Okay, I’m going to switch this one up and remind my Exasperated subscribers that I actually do work and I don’t simply complain on the internet. I do that, too, but for this Mini Exasperation, I’ll share a little behind the scenes of some of the design work I do on a day-to-day basis. This week, Space Syntax.

Share

What Is Space Syntax?

Space Syntax is the theory; Depthmap is the software. Space Syntax is a science-based, human-focused approach that investigates relationships between spatial layout and a range of social, economic, and environmental phenomena. Depthmap is the open-source tool that allows planners and exasperated laypeople to help make sense of the lines and spaces on a map.

Learning the right buttons to push is about 10% of the value and expertise you can develop with this tool—the rest is network and/or architectural drawing data prep and interpretation. In my 2+ years of learning Space Syntax, I’ve improved my:

• Understanding of the value of open-source street network data and its limitations.

• Ability to use CAD software to prepare and modify architectural drawings for analysis.

• Communication skills to help organize science- and data-backed solutions to thorny problems whose answers are often educated guesses. Space Syntax at least provides some sense of order to erratic human behavior.

• Ability to help places improve their street network design, more efficiently provide transit and micromobility services, and ensure land use and transportation are more closely aligned than they would have been otherwise.

This is a software whose outputs enhance traditional Geographic Information Systems—GIS—analysis and whose use complements traditional simulation modeling software (PTV Viswalk, Legion, Cube, others).

Space Syntax is NOT an agent-based modeling software.

Agent-based models combine enriched spatial models with behavioral object-oriented programming.1 Space Syntax is much simpler to program than a full model required for meaningful results from an agent-based model. But because it’s lightweight, the miasma of inputs and outputs needed, and how to interpret them, is much more nebulous. That’s why I get paid the medium bucks.

Instead of an enriched network and pixels to act like humans, Space Syntax is agnostic. Inputs to the software are CAD-based and can be IDd as street centerline segments.2 For example:

From here, there is a series of menus and buttons to press (which I’m happy to walk through if readers want it, later), to understand:

• Choice: how often a particular segment would be used by any road user traveling a specific distance starting from any location.

• Integration: the software can also help an analyst understand how connected any segment is to all other segments.

What does this mean?3

A Choice Example

Remember: “choice” in this context refers to a prediction of what routes a traveler will choose as they pass along or through the community along the network.

The grossly over simplified thoughts you might include in a presentation:

• Observation: Certain segments—notably many of the North-South connector routes are chosen no matter the trip distance. Interpretation: It’s important to maintain throughput for all modes, but motor vehicle and bus traffic should be prioritized—new routes could be considered for the reddest segments.

• Observation: It makes sense that the shorter distances are bluer / chosen less and the longer trips are redder / chosen more frequently. Interpretation: An evenly-spaced grid throughout an entire study are will likely always be blue—a traveler would be fully indifferent among a particular route. Remember, this analysis doesn’t take into account origin or destination, route preference, speed limits, and human behavior.

• Observation: It makes sense that the central arteries are brighter—there are more nodes and more total possible connections. Interpretation: Compare this analysis to observed traffic patterns and enriched data—does it make sense? Are the most “chosen” routes also the most used for moving through the neighborhood?

An Integration Example

Remember: “integration” in this context refers to the relative density of the network. How relatively connected every node (intersection) is to every other node for the determined trip length.

Integration is mostly useless on its own in this context—the major interpretation is if you’re looking agnostically at building a gridded network, as you increase the length of the trip, the whole network should glow red. Integration is always best paired with land uses in a GIS to undferstand whether your network is supporting the public economics or not.

Takeaways

This post was a tremendously oversimplified basic overview of Space Syntax as a non-consquential activity and really gets at about 40% of the power of this software. Here are a few problems that I left in on purpose (I swear):

• The network is likely too small for the actual area I’m seeking to analyze.

• The network may or may not be fully connected. I did not check the nodal connections. The software is not geospatial and is not itself aware—nor can it be made aware—of place.

• There are stray segments that are likely distorting the model. Remember (or I guess learn for the first time), Space Syntax is gravitational, meaning that it will pull choice closer to areas of complexity, or as you should interpret it, mess. A human actor won’t act like a Space Syntax output model necessarily.

• I chose specific trip lengths, but did I choose the correct ones? Why not 1500m or 250m for a small network? How can I know I chose correctly?

Articles I Liked

DOT wants to prohibit free buses. That could be a problem for Mamdani in NYC. by Chris Marquette for Politico

Regardless of whether you think free buses are a good idea or not, the Fed meddling in policy decisions without clear economics is more idiocy from the dumbest people who hold so much money and power. This is regulatory capture run amok and manifest in the Road Rules guy sharing a single brain cell with the President.

If I were NYC, I’d simply enroll every New Yorker in some program that qualifies them for fair fares, send an OMNY card or appropriate app (lol) upgrade. Demand-side economics mostly doesn’t work either—it’s harder to administrate and means-testing eats away at gains and can be hopelessly captured by capital—but: tourists and visitors still pay, you still get accurate counts on buses, but you lose the benefit of fast boarding.

Bus lane enforcement first, freedom to travel, also first.

This is what the inside of the world’s fastest train looks like

Meanwhile.

Rep. Simon introduces a bill to nationalize BART’s ambassador program by Jose Fermoso for Berkeleyside

I can’t prove this but I just know Alicia Trost is behind this in some way.

Writer I Support

The Friendly City Urbanist

A newsletter about land use, housing, transportation, and climate policy in Harrisonburg, the Shenandoah Valley, and beyond. Currently living in the Netherlands, enrolled in the Global Urban Transformations Master's program at Utrecht University.

By Brent Finnegan

Here’s what I did.

I showed up for friend-of-Exasperated Infrastructures’ Kathy Park Price’s tour of open space, or lack thereof, in Long Island City. There’s yours truly in the orange coat and backpack. I do look ready for a cold-weather hike. It was 6 degrees Fahrenheit. The tour was part of a larger campaign for the amazing advocacy organization, called New Yorkers for Parks (NY4P), that does exactly what it says on the tin. They research and advocate for parks, and what they don’t say on the tin, they partner with other organizations that care about open space and parks to amplify this message to elected officials, residents, workers, and help give a meaningful voice to the underheard. Don’t ever let anyone tell you your voice doesn’t matter, and don’t ever shy away from being the best version of yourself by just showing up.

But it doesn’t matter. I showed up—along with dozens of friends and fellow advocates who got the Councilwoman (CM Julie Won) out for a press op, and an article in a widely-circulated local paper. We toured a half dozen sites where there have been new parks built, new parks planned, or new ones needed, and heard from local residents who deserve a place to decompress, connect, and learn with neighbors and friends without having to schlep all the way to elsewhere.

We should be building connected communities, and we should be connecting them with parks and bikeways and friendships.

~*_________________________*~

Last week, I also worked with a delegation from Transportation for Massachusetts to help them understand messaging around congestion pricing1 to eventually help convince Governor Healy et al to pilot it forever around Boston. The contents of this talk were off the record, so I’m not going to post any findings or shared thoughts here about it, but it was really great to be in this room with people DOING STUFF.

DO MORE STUFF.

Subscribe now

A Few Small Articles

MUST READ

A Better Billion: Expanding Transit & Housing for a More Affordable New York

by the Transit Costs Project team, including friends of EI, Eric Goldwyn, Andrew Lynch, Nolan Hicks, Alon Levy, Elif Ensari, and Franklin Tang

This report is a masterful guide and vision that looks beyond the limited scope of “what if we just made the buses free.2” It reports on what the future of our system could look like under realistic capacity and geometry constraints,3 but holds cost caps relatively loose.4 The point is to have a realistic and, their words, audacious conversation with anyone who will listen about how we move throughout our city.

It’s not audacious to expect less friction in getting around our city. In fact, this is the best possible deal. For a mere 5% of the total cost of the system5—should it be built from scratch today—we (and you if you don’t live here but want to come visit us for our stuff) get 41 miles of new subways, 64 new stations, and an inducement of 167,000 new housing units.

We also get to collectively vision and foam. I’ll do a longer dive on this soon.

Memo to Mamdani: Bring Back the Weekend G Train to Forest Hills

by John Surico for Streetsblog NYC

John Surico, no relation, wrote this short, easy-to-grasp memo for Streetsblog. We can reëxtend the G train to Forest Hills from its current terminus, Court Sq in Long Island City, on weekends only (so as to not compete for track with the M), sorta…right now. We do not have to build new tunnels, and the community has a history with this connection. The geometry problems are solvable and dovetail nicely with a project I’m involved in, which would support this extension full-time, and that at least two of the authors above are also working on: QueensLink.

“Build more transit, make it work, and figure the rest out later.” Anyway, go read this (it'll take you 2 minutes) and think about how small transit improvements: speed, frequency, patronage (who's riding with you and how many people?), and coverage (where the service goes and when) *thanks to Jarrett Walker for helping me think about transit like this.6

Friend of the week: Paul Salama from “Transform Government”

Loved this post from Paul Salama. Give him a follow and encourage more stream-of-consciousness that makes a lot of sense!

Transform Government

Rapid-Fire 2026

My writing on here has taken the think-piece form. I’ve loved using the writing process to learn, to reveal, to arrive somewhere I didn’t expect. But working through ideas also means a growing weight of topics I want dive into and share, but can’t give sufficient space to do them justice. Other priorities—launching an…

Read more

4 months ago · 1 like · 3 comments · Paul S.

Second Friend of the week: Jon John Wesolowski, aka

“The Happy Urbanist”

The Happy Urbanist

Tactical and practical ways to empower yourself and your community towards a better city.

By Jon Jon Wesolowski

If I’m exasperated, and I am, then Jon Jon, a name so nice you always say it twice, is happy. I love his philosophical musings and especially love his video content @thehappyurbanist. Give a follow to both and think like me—or like you, as if you were me, but you.

I’ve been writing this newsletter since April 2020, starting with a series of posts about books about planning, engineering, and urbanism that I’ve loved and how you can read them, too, to think about things the way I do. Some of you did this (I know), and some are wondering how you see these long lists. I think it’s time to republish them and update them with 6 more years of knowledge, and 6 more years of incredible partnership with Island Press, which has now been folded into Princeton University Press but will remain as a standalone imprint.

Expect something from me in this regard in the next few weeks.

But today’s thought is: you can just do stuff. The same way I started this newsletter on a calculated whim and have kept at it for half a decade. The same way the Mamdani administration filled in a bike pothole within a week of being sworn in, or simply hiring the best people (shout out Midori Valdivia and Mike Flynn!) to go do stuff. There’s a lot of uncertainty from the old guard in this vein: how do you build a weeks-long messaging campaign to combat a half-day activity that will be done and dusted and have captured a handful of media cycles that all say the same thing?

It’s time to start that blog. Or email that contact. Fill in a bike lane bump. Or learn that new skill or hit that happy hour. Go do it. Be like Zohran. Hope to see you there.

Articles I’ve Been Reading

The Reauthorization of Federal Transportation Programs Offers Policymakers an Opportunity to Improve Effectiveness, Environmental Sustainability, and Access

by Yonah Freemark et al. for the Urban Institute

In advance of the Reauthorization piece that’s coming shortly, I wanted to highlight this data-backed exercise from Yonah Freemark et al. for the Urban Institute. The essay outlines three pathways to success to build on the outputs from the IIJA/IRA:

1. Guarantee Effective Grant Use

2. Increase Environmental Sustainability

3. Leverage Transportation Investments to Fund Communities that Need Them the Most

All good ideas. All just vague enough and progressive enough to never happen. Still a good place to start.

Why New Jersey Has New Comprehensive E-Bike Regulations

by Ximena Conde for the Philadelphia Inquirer b/w GovTech

The classic case of the politically expedient solution in search of an honest-to-god problem, and the perfect metaphor for the Murphy Administration throughout his tenure. It’s also a parable for transportation policy administration in practice: counter-intuitiveness. On its face, a policy to register a motor vehicle—even an e-bike or pedal-assisted one—makes sense. Let’s follow the logic, or at least the triggering event: a e-bike user hits a pedestrian on a delivery. The magical logic of due process follows. All e-bikes are now the problem and must be registered in case a future incident causes the same problem; then the MVC1 can link the incident to the particular cyclist, and an inquiry can begin.

Except, of course, it’s not that simple. Any number of problems arise here. These issues fall into two buckets: administrative and problem ID.

Administrative: The most salient problem here is jurisdiction. The State of New Jersey is responsible for the maintenance of registration records; whoever is responsible for the road2 would likely issue a traffic infraction; whichever court would try a case in (hopefully) the same jurisdiction as where the infraction was issued; the insurance company would need to be involved. The problem here isn’t that we don’t know how to do this, generally. We do it for incidents involving motor vehicles—cars, trucks, motorcycles—all the time.

We simply don’t have a system for bikes, and onboarding all current bike riders in the state will be a long and expensive endeavor. There’s inbound and outbound outreach, internal training. Then there’s the data. These systems are already antiquated, and I fear the cost to update them to whatever modern standard is deemed necessary3 will far outstrip any material benefit…until it doesn’t. At that time, we may have an entirely new tech and governance regime for bikes, cars, trams, buses, trains, and the public realm.

It continues to astound me that our policymakers are simply making this all up on my dime.

Problem ID: Longtime Exasperated readers know I will continue to pull on this thread until there’s nothing left. An essential question that policymakers continue to ignore(?)4 is “What problem does my solution actually solve?” I’m not naive. I know there are big-money interests shaping outcomes that are, quite simply, unrelated to bicycle safety, insurance schema, and process. But it’s curious here since the principal in this equation, Governor Phil Murphy, was already a lame duck, and the agents here—who is this for?

Is there any evidence that tying e-bike registrations to MVC operations increases road safety? This feels more like a capitulation to anti-bike road warriors who have feelings about cyclists and e-bikes, generally, rather than a meaningful policy geared toward safety.

Unwilling to make ‘a bad deal even worse,’ Mayor Johnson drops out of competition to buy back parking meters

by Fran Spielman for the Chicago Sun Times

Long story short, right there in the headline. The City of Chicago sold the rights to many of its parking meters for 75 years to a private operator in 2008. Seventeen years into this deal, the City has lost so much on this deal that its finances are laughable. For example, if the city wants to shut down a street for a parade or a block party…it also has to buy out the parking meters, making this deal somehow doubly bad.

Ever since Mayor Daley (the Younger) sold these rights, trading a short-term fiscal crisis for a long-long-term one, public finance economists have sought to find a way out of the deal.5 Unfortunately, the terms are air-tight and the new Mayor, Brandon Johnson, has ruled out an insane leveraged buyout that would, triply bad, saddle the city with debt, whose service would require raising parking rates to a level that would quash demand.

I guess more people would take transit. That’s a win.

A Writer for You to Follow

I’m a big fan of her publication, the “New Urban Order” Substack; she writes more frequently and often more relevantly than I. Give her a follow! Me too, though.

The New Urban Order

Exploring cities around the world, and the housing, climate, mobility, culture, and tech in them.

By Diana Lind

First, hello to all new subs from DC this week. It was great to meet all of you and you’ll be able to find me here, on LinkedIn, by email, or by text if we bumped iPhones.1

Second, and as always, feel free to share this post with friends or colleagues who you’d think would like a weekly dose of exasperation and policy, interviews and book reviews, and long-form essays (reauth takes are coming…soon).

Third, sorry this is very late. My computer broke last Saturday and no one was happy.

Dispatches from Washington DC

Each January, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) hosts its annual meeting (AM) in Washington DC’s Washington Convention Center.2 And three years from four I attend the hallways and happy hours portion of the conference—meaning I make my way to DC and spend four to five days taking meetings, coffees, and lunches with colleagues and coworkers, new and old, to build and deepen relationships. I’ll say that in my career, gliding through downtown DC for a few days each January has been the most influential week in my burgeoning career.

5 Dos and Donts from a decade at #TRBAM

I’ve been told to use more lists in my screeds.

DO attend the conference if you’re an academic or an aspiring researcher in the field.

The TRB is a project of the National Science Foundation and is, first and foremost, an academic and research body. There operate dozens of different committees, theoretically, whose function is to manage ideas and research related to the transportation, infrastructure, and inreasingly, intelligent systems field. In between the presentations of research and findings, the committees meet and discuss alll things from structure to focus among other topics related to the committee. If you’re an academic, in school to become one, or are simply the largest nerd, it is worthwhile to attend the conference over its 4 days. If you’re a practitioner, advocate, or lesser nerd, the content of the conference itself may not be your best choice for time spend.

DON’T expect to take in the entire conference at once.

In years’ past, close to 10,000 people have descended upon DC for the conference from all walks of life and relationships to the field. I will say the 2026 conference felt more subdued than usual, even though I didn’t attend the conference. I’ve heard rumblings attendance was down about 40%, somewhat attributable to the ongoing changes in committee structure and operations and the fear to fly to the US as an international presenter or representative. The city itself felt tense and eerily empty. Vibes were way off.

DO attend the receptions, sparingly.

Much ado about the daytime events aside, firms and universities will sponsor receptions each evening starting the Saturday before. Friend of Exasperated Infrastructures, Greg Rogers, organizes a spreadsheet that you’ll have access to if you ask either of us nicely. Here was this years’

Words of advice, you cannot make all of these and don’t try:

• The times often overlap. Most of these run from 6-8.

• These are close to one another, but there’s still a walking distance between them and it’s January in Washington.

• Focus on quality over quantity. You’re not going to fully advance your career in two hours. Meet people that you like and enjoy learning about what they like. Networking is goofy, but making friends you can work with is not.

DON’T forget to follow up.

Use your email, your LinkedIn, your phone and keep in touch with the people you meet. It is OK to send a text or an email a few days after everyone disperses. Following along is only annoying if you, dear reader, are annoying.

DO take some time to recover.

It’s a whole year until TRB reconvenes in January 2027. So do take the time to relax and recover and then get back to it. Dozens of other conferences to attend this year around the country, so let’s not let it all out at once.

Articles I’ve Been Reading

World-Class American Transit

by Transportation for America

A new report from my alma mater produced by friend of Exasperated Infrastrutures, Corrigan Salerno. The takeaway is clear: we must invest and invest wisely into our nation’s fraying and decaying local and regional transit systems to the tune of $230 billion a year for the next 20 years.

This seems like a lot of money but it amounts to an investment of about $676 a person a yea—all in—to helps us compete with our global counterparts. This assumes no user fees, no debt, no outside funding, private or otherwise. I’m not and this report doesn’t purport to naïveté that this number is remotely possible in our current state of…affairs. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need an honest assessment that accounts for decades of underinvestment.

I’ve been told that a few corrollary reports are coming to measure benefits.

The United States needs fewer bus stops

by Nithin Vejendla for Work in Progress (h/t once again)

I like this piece and it’s got the duel benefit of making salient points and being well-written. Transit planning and operations is a game of tradeoffs: coverage versus speed, cost versus service, revenue sourcing versus spending, etc. If you can think of one problem, I have a handful of equal and opposite problems that don’t fit neatly into a single tradeoff. This is where good community problem ID comes in. Yes data and map shed analysis is helpful for determining optimal solutions, but our models can’t capture stories on their own. We need it all and Nithin is right.

And, hey, maybe we can recapture some of those dollars to reinvest in our systems. A little here and a little there can make a big difference in the aggregate.

A Recent Writer I’ve Enjoyed

I want to give a shoutout to Andy Boneau, the writer of:

Urbanism Speakeasy with Andy Boenau

Simple truths about city planning & transportation to help you promote healthy infrastructure.

Andy’s just been named the new Director of the Richmond, VA Department of Transportation. We’re a big fan of Andy in this house and wish him all the best of luck as he steps into lead the city into the future.

My goal is to follow the following format:

1. An Observation with a Focus on Urban Politics and Infrastructure.

Pretty straightforward. This could be a few paragraphs, a poll, a cool map(s), just something that connected with me or very obviously did not. I may highlight a local or state or federal agency that’s done great, interesting, or bad work. I may seek some engagement. Just a way to get the thoughts out. This should be a peek in to my exasperation.

2. A Few Articles That Piqued My Interest and a Contextualization

Between 1-4 articles that I found on my travels through the web. Often, I’ll try to link back to (which you should DEFINITELY subscribe to), or another interesting pathway. I’ll try to give some context that pulls together my exasperated expertise. That’s where the gold is. That’s what you want.

3. A Writer / Substacker I Think You Should Follow

I’m trying to continue to build community online—and so I feel that highlighting another writer whose insights I find inspire mine shouldn’t be gatekept.

Exasperated Survey [~5 minutes of your time]

TAKE THE SURVEY HERE!

I’ve been at this for 5.5 years now, and I’ve amassed almost 2,000 of you as subscribers, friends of the newsletter, and first timers! I want to know more about you, why you tune in when I publish, and what could make you more excited for the future of Exasperated Infrastructures.

I’m going to leave this survey open for about a month and hopefully collect interesting and meaningful data, which I’ll then publish with some other metrics and transparancy.

If you’d like, you can enter to win a free year of archival posts and a handful of stickers to show off your support! All you have to do is associate your email with the response and then tell me you’d like to be entered in the drawing.

TAKE THE SURVEY HERE!

Articles I’ve Been Reading

This week I’ve got three new ones—two rail and an off-the-rail one.

Sound Transit Board Sets Aside Idea of Skipping Second Downtown Tunnel

Ryan Racker for The Urbanist

I’ll let you read this one—and it’s a great example of technical writing made clear for public consumption. A few things to look for in the meta-argument:

• False equivalence: between the different “tunneling” choices. There are often many options to address problematic infrastructure development and management of decay. These are often uncovered during environmental review as the order of operations demands…ideas whose environmental impact we1 need to judge. Alternatives analysis is deeply political insofar as boosters of a specific idea or another, or the no-bult/null alternative, make their case to guide the criteria toward the politically expedient choice. A 3-σ estimate of savings or costs or impacts that puts a hard limit on a specific choice, even if it’s the most logical choice in a vacuum. There is no such thing as an apolitical correct choice.

• Cost comparisons: cost is the one variable a non-technical audience can directly connect to, vis-à-vis a $3, $13, or $30 billion project. These numbers, meaningless on their own, signal a willingness to invest in place. There’s a difference of differences between $3 billion and $0, just as there is a difference between $3 billion and $30 billion. The how and why of cost is what to look for here. What happens if we don’t do the smaller project? What happens if we do the big project? What happens if some of it gets done? Who wins? Who loses? Is there an effort to reconcile these actors/stakeholders?

What do you think?

California drops lawsuit seeking to reinstate federal funding for the state’s bullet train

by Sophie Austin for The Associated Press

“Moving forward without the Trump administration’s involvement allows the Authority to pursue proven global best practices used successfully by modern high-speed rail systems around the world,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

That’s telling and perhaps a bellwether for the future of transportation funding for large projects. California is lucky(?) that it can forego federal oversight for this project voluntarily since it’s entirely self-contained within a single state. It’s not necessarily subject to Interstate Commerce Oversight. Since it’s foregoing funding from the feds, mostly similar. I can foresee a project problem arising with materials sourcing: parts not fully chained in California will be subject to tariffs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these morons running our country into the ground attempt interstate tariffs from “red”-to-“blue”2 states to punish people for existing differently than them. What a world.

Long live the doomed project that is CAHSR!

Are You Enjoying Our Linguine?

by Francesco Pacifco for The Dial

I loved this piece that is both about linguine and determinedly not. I often think about how to be a bobobo3 in a world that pacifies them and reviles them in a great equivocation of the Pale Blue Dot as a matryoshka doll. You see that small dot amongst the great blue shift from Voyager I? That’s us. You see the piazzetta, right there, represented on your Google Map as a Pale Blue Pin? That’s us. You see the agglomeration of all the palest, bluest, likeliest dots on all the panoptical illusions i.e. smartphones? That’s us, in the future.

Don’t be a culture vulture, but don’t ignore travel for fear of not being able to do it “correctly.” As Tony Bourdain made it his life’s work to not be a tourist, but a traveler, so too must you try to experience the world, not through [insert LLM-likely]-colored glasses, which, if you’re lucky like me, will be themselves pale blue dots with a simple dollop of pupil.

I’m going to keep the parable loose here about how this article relates to infrastructure planning, but I promise it has to do with BABA4 and not bobo.

A Recent Writer I’ve Enjoyed

A big fan of Marco Chitti’s “Italian (urban) Letters” as a site of technical essays and fantastic insights that often enhance or bump up against my own.

I’m so proud that my little engine of exasperation has been able to partner with Island Press for the last few years and now I’m excited to share some of the benefits with you, dear reader. Through Midnight on March 2, all (except NACTO’s new amazing guideline (my write-up coming next week)) e-books are $4.99. The best part of this deal is that you get to support:

• A small, but mighty publishing house responsible for a biiiiiiig number of the planning and urbanism books you’ve read or have wanted to read. If they don’t exist these books don’t get published.

• Authors and thinkers who are actively working to make our communities better. This federal, uh, situation aside, we’ve had an uphill battle to fight in the history of dignity and access to life’s beautiful bounties forever. Some of the doers have decided to write their experiences as a cautionary tale, a set of instructions, or a novel perspective and it’s a great idea for you to thank them by supporting their writing.

• You. You get to read an amazing new book to help quell your exasperation for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Come back after you've bought a book

I’m tired of writing about this administration but to say this:

The month of absolute stress testing will be followed by years and decades of a deep response. We are a nation of individuals and won’t be ruled by a pathetic attempt at anything but the most mediocre in the long term.

In the meantime, I’m proud of Gov. Hochul for rebuking Duffy’s scarememo, written by an idiot on behalf of a bigger idiot thinking we’re all idiots.

Some Articles I Liked This Week

High-speed rail line with 300 km/h trains will run between Toronto and Quebec City, Trudeau announces by Peter Zimonjic for CBC News

Here’s a map of a proposed HSR with a top speed of 300km/hr (186mph) that would connect Quebec City and Toronto, with intermediate stops in business and leisure destinations, like Ottowa and Montreal. They’re expecting the planning and design to cost C$4 billion and construction to cost close to C$60 billion, which is on its face a lot of money. The 800km journey between Toronto and Quebec City current takes about 8.5 hours to drive—a train that tops out at 300km/hr could cut that trip in half, or more depending on conditions and findings from the design and planning work.

Exasperated: I’m not exasperated about this on its face; yes the costs are expensive, but not really, since the 800+ km track would cost just ~$375 million per km (remember there will be at least two tracks that run parallel), which is a lot but waaaaaay less than California’s HSR, which is topping out at, well, much more. We’ve also got to remember that these projects don’t exist in a vacuum: they necessarily create construction and support jobs during a decade or more of design and construction, and many more after the fact, never mind the amount of GDP will travel up and down this corridor, never mind the environmental and never mind the safety benefits. It’s a great project that’s leaning very conservative on its costs and timelines to set expectations correctly. Looking forward to following this one.

Austin just made it illegal to park in bike lanes by Luz Moren-Lozano for KUT 90.5

This rule, now codified into law and able to be enforced, will fine drivers between $50 and $300 for parking, idling, or otherwise obstructing the free flow of marked bike lanes in Austin, TX. This move will help improve street legibility and seek to combat safety issues when bikes and cars collide.

Exasperated: This is a great idea in theory but I’ll have to read the ordinance’s text to get a sense of whether this law has any teeth at all or is a lot of yap. Here’s what I’d look for:

• Is there a clear definition of what an infraction would look like and a clear delineation of what would trigger a $50 fine compared to a $300 fine?

• What does enforcement look like? How will it be applied equitably so the city’s not just broken-windowsing its way to a cash grab?

• What are the triggers for whether the bill needs a re-look? How will the bill text prevent it from being raided by a less-friendly Council?

Uber, Lyft riders choose ride-hailing over transit to save time: study by Dan Zukowski for Smart Cities Dive

No shit.

Exasperated: This report is not saying anything new at all, but we’ve got no real answer to it, either. Even in New York with the most robust transit system and peripherals and other ways to get around, ride-hail and point-to-point cars are a preferred choice for so many city revelers and workers.

The Subway is an amazing engineering feat and a perhaps-oiled machine, but its headways (times between arrivals) are all over the place and greatly increase during hours outside of “peak” travel. If I’m drunk, tired, other things, after a night out am I really going to choose to wait 45 minutes for an F train with a transfer to an A, which is another 30-minute wait? Unless it’s $100, which it might be, the answer is no. And I do this for a living and actively think about this tradeoff in almost every waking moment.

The way we think about transit has to fundamentally change. LOL. For another piece, but the outcome here is expected and the profits ripped away from our transit systems are both a feature and a market force worth fighting for.

A job I’m not qualified for but maybe someone you know is.

https://rpa.org/join/transportation-associate

If I were 12 years younger and hungry for a deep dive into New York and regional transportation knowledge, this job would be actually perfect. Pay is fine for a young person, but the HUUUUUUGE W is being able to learn from Tiffany-Ann Taylor for as long as she’ll have you.

Subscribe now

It1 seems like for the time being one Executive Day feels like a whole decade of shit flooding. I’m amazed that this narrative has unconsciously flown under many front-and-center narratives from our most insurgent reporters. I’m not saying it’s not happening. Instead, I’m saying I can’t recall a take calling out this playbook as the main goal of the first few decades weeks of 47’s stupid tenure. Lots of outlets and take machines (including this one) have been exasperated about the fumble-through-fiat Executive Order2 issuances that have quite literally confounded courts and policymakers and, to the detriment of all Americans, stopped or stymied payment or reimbursement on so many projects and entitlements that is somehow doing the thing conservatives claim to want but, you know, not like that.

Steve Bannon—peering from the depths of hell for this round of democracy deathmatch3—is not the first person to instruct an insurgent polity4 to “flood the zone” with an overwhelming amount of shit, but he’s certainly the most memorable:

While watching the news coverage of Steve Bannon’s initial appearance in federal court on Monday, I kept thinking about his 2018 confession to the acclaimed writer Michael Lewis. His quote is like a compass that orients this crazy era of American politics. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

—Brian Stelter, This infamous Steve Bannon quote is key to understanding America’s crazy politics, CNN Business, 11/21/21

The media is the enemy—give them so many competing stories and make sure the entire Overton window and beyond is full of conflict and “news.” The courts can’t keep up. Public Opinion not only can’t keep up, it can’t be formed. Scatter the ashes of words—1984 that shit. For every dozen Executive Orders the White House issues, each of which is mired in socio-populist language and a legal grey area, a judge/court needs to approach these hammers to the swirling plates of government with due process. An injunction here; a stay there; a retraining order way over there.

All while The White House and its merry band of debuilders continue to issue more orders with the intent of breaking normal process in due time. These orders and memos and court filings come out at all times of the day and night. Stop work orders—and we’ll get to transportation in a minute—come on Friday or Saturday but they’re not enjoined or reversed for a few days leaving millions—billions—trillions—of dollars in the vague control of the world’s richest doofus while the rest of us, working across all levels of dogooder government in the worst possible position. Uncertainty.

The playbook is to make “truth” unknowable and to offer a solution through strong leadership. Daddy will make it better—we’re from the government and we’re here to help.5 But soon there’s no more government and aid is conditional on fealty to the throne.6 Thanks for the help, CNN:

Okay, you’re asking yourself what does this have to do with transportation and infrastructure? As I’ve briefly reported on over the past month,7 the Executive Orders that target transportation are not bad8 so much as inconclusive: what projects are/would still be funded? What does “under review” mean? Can the9 government break its contract to pay for the thing it promised to pay for—in transportation parlance (and other parlance) called a Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA)? Which parts of projects can move forward, while others cannot? Where does preemption come into play here? Should we be having more sex?10

One of the consequences of the flood-the-zone splooge is unintended consequences—when you’re not thoughtful at all, on purpose—even your “allies” feel the facepunch. Are we directing less Federal money to states with historically low birth rates—solid red states—or will USDOT find a way to just not follow its own guidance? Or will people in these states, often transit-starved or non-car-mode-starved, accept their beating as long as blue states also get hurt? Is this where we are?

Is safety “woke?” Over 40,000 people die annually on our roads. The message this government is sending to its people, by issuing a STOP WORK ORDER11 on all “Road to Zero” projects is that these lives are not worth saving, individually and collectively. Pick one of these deaths out of a hat—each one is preventable—and you’ll find a real person there; you’ll have no idea who this person is or where they’re from; or their reason for traveling. Poorly designed roads and drunk drivers don’t discriminate, though. They’ll kill you the same no matter how “woke” you are.12 Is this where we are?13

Yes. Flood the zone with shit and we’ll all eat it forever.

Some articles from the last few weeks I’ve liked.

Letters to Elon; Memos for Leslie

Plain Bagel Congestion Pricing: The Limits of a One-Dimensional Approach

New York has congestion pricing—finally!—and with it, the promise of billions to fund transit. Yet the single-minded political goal of raising $1 billion in revenue risks reaching genuine “congestion relief.” That’s no accident: a tangle of drawn-out reviews, a predetermined infrastructure paradigm, and narrowly framed legislation forced the program int…

Read more

a year ago · Paul S.

Paul Salama, the author of the above post brings a much-needed perspective to congestion pricing to fill out the pockets of “how could we move forward differently?” given its vulnerability to Federal frickery.

Exasperation: No this is good actually, we need to make sure that there are structural platforms in place to ensure that this policy runs its course based on sound economics and data. We need stories. Go subscribe to Paul’s page to keep up to date with a very smart technologist and urbanist. Here’s another outstanding piece of work from Paul during his time at Cornell Tech.

Safe Streets: Working to curb road deaths by Max J. Krupnick for Harvard Magazine

This is all you need to know from this article: “Those unable to upsize, like bikers and pedestrians, suffer the most: pedestrian deaths have doubled since 2009.” But read on for a pretty well-researched and presented argument for safer streets. Urban design, car design, and policy design are all factors in the war against car death.

Exasperated: Despite the intent of this expose, I do not understand why road safety and urban planning principles, in general, are treated by general-audience reporters as this big black box of mystery. The problems we face generally are neither confusing nor delicate: 40,000 people die on our streets every year, inside and outside cars. They’re preventable, and yet; specifically and contextually I understand where planning and engineering can get overly technical for a general audience, who don’t need to know the specifics of a curb-cut slope or the data behind the data-driven decision-making. Honestly, who is self-selected into reading Harvard Magazine and can’t figure out from context what these concepts are? Am I being naive now?

I also didn’t really get a lede from this article besides the one quoted about halfway down, which dampens the urgency of this article. It feels a little effete does it not?

In a fit of somewhere between rage, apathy, and exasperation, we’re through A SINGLE WEEK of 47’s Ragnarok. This deep discount dude and his band of leitgestapo truly believe government (and water?) turns on and off like a faucet. At best, his office (he can’t read) is issuing a maelstrom of Executive Orders to test the limits of our democracy, and at worst, he’s actively trying to dismantle the Federal government in a week that millions of people have spent their lives building to serve its people.

Subscribe now

Important to name and shame these stupid things so here are two of the dumbest things I’ve ever read and I’ve had the opportunity to engage with some of the dumbest takes of all time during my five years of publishing:

1. ENDING ILLEGAL DISCRIMINATION AND RESTORING MERIT-BASED OPPORTUNITY1

2. UNLEASHING AMERICAN ENERGY

The reason why these are so dumb is infinity-fold, but two main reasons: they direct people to stop doing things no one was doing in the first place and here’s the important part. They are trojan horses. The stated purpose is one thing, but the idea is to fuzzy up the rulemaking to sneak programs and authoritarian ideology through the back. Calling something “woke” and “Green New Deal” is an excuse to name something they don’t like “woke,” blame everyone for ruining the economy, and refill the policy bucket with regressive directives. Watch out for this. Literally everywhere.

In a continued fit of stupidity, this government never actually froze the funds via this specific “order,” but said they did, and now facing massive backlash, are rescinding the order they never issued. So …literally nothing?2

If you thought we had a few, uh, weeks to put together a plan to fight back, you’re wrong and will continue to be wrong. These people will never tell the truth and will never follow through on anything that helps you or me. It’s lies and obfuscation all the way down. It’s time to fight, but considering this is a ~*transportation and infrastructure*~ blog, we’ll stick to how we can actually fight the government clawing back dollars and sending us back to when America was Great3

We can thank these braindead losers inside the vaunted Federal government for forcing the conversation we’ve needed to have. It’s time to rethink how we build projects in the US. Transportation and infrastructure are almost always welfare activities: very rarely do projects capture the value in direct revenue to make profit enough to operate as a going concern. These projects are not supposed to do that. We don’t run transportation at a loss, we run transportation at a reasonable cost.

Our collective efforts have built hundreds of thousands of miles of road and rail.4 The Interstate Rail network and the Interstate Highway System were and are a product of many different strains of thought that came together at the Federal level; much of which was and is based in national defense principles: the military needed to move and the dirt roads weren’t cutting it. The North needed to win and the rail system was a major factor.

Idea #1: Turn over much of the construction oversight to the Department of Defense and staff the Army Corps of Engineers with (more than just engineers) the capacity to build hard things and to ensure interstate preemption when necessary. This includes rail and road.5 You know what, let’s explore partnerships across the board and piecemeal this out to agencies that want it. Commerce? Let’s go. HUD? Sure why not. Energy? Oh yeah.

Does this neuter the Department of Transportation? Not if we have smart legislation that rethinks USDOT’s purpose and correctly communicates these ideas to a mostly skeptical public.6 Does it become more of a national clearinghouse of good ideas and a passthrough for competitive grantmaking—either by formula or discretion? Does it maintain its role as a rulemaking authority to ensure the absolute value of best practice? Does it become the prime/sub agency to our other agencies—and lead us into the future of federal de-siloing?

Idea #2: Rethink the role of the US Department of Transportation. What do we need from our Federal government? Should we rebrand as a Department of Mobility?7

Here’s how I don’t want this interpreted: We’re not going to cut the popular and practiced programs like the FTA’s “Capital Investment Grants” (CIG) or FHWA’s “Safe Streets for All” (SS4A) programs but we are going to rethink how we allocate dollars. Who needs direct receipt? When does it make sense for state DOTs to control capital and operating budgets versus local and regional governments?

Does it even make sense to think of transportation by mode, first, anymore? Wouldn’t we be better served by thinking of how an individual moves throughout the world and then find a collective solution, mode agnostic, to get people to their destinations from anywhere by the means that make sense? Isn’t that the point of a resilient system? Maybe today we’re taking an AV/EV and tomorrow, a bike, and over the weekend a system of fantastic modern trains to get to our destination?

Idea #3: Is it time to give a gigantic middle finger to the Fed by doing what they say and devolving the spending to the states prophylactically ?

I know this is an alt-Right-coded idea, but the best offense against this government of fools is to simply be their jester, no? I worry about this because a lot of people will get hurt, but at least we can demonstrate how important a federal government for infrastructure projects is by temporarily saying, “Okay, you win.” Maybe our genious electorate should experience a starved road system and no transit at all for us to finally have the national conversation that the anti-transit and anti-government people are simply wrong and driven by something other than “freedom.” Maybe Californians shouldn’t be funding road expansions in deep-red states.

Maybe half-measures are more appropriate: no more California dollars can be spent on road projects outside California; in this way, transit becomes an attractive investment because it’s either transit or nothing at all.8 Every citizen/taxpayer in a certain state can see how USDOM spends their dollars nationwide, built by the Army Corps, for the sake of national defense. Transit is national defense. The freedom to move is what we’re looking for here.

Because what could be Greater than a country whose citizens ride the train to work and bike for fun on safe streets with their kids and knowing that each citizen’s hard work made that happen?

Leave a comment

Short List of Things I Like This Week

CMAP’s Safety Newsletter by CMAP staff (brought to EI friend Victoria Barrett from CMAP)

This brief continues a good trend of our MPOs (regional planning organizations, among other things) communicating important data evaluation techniques, more appropriate language for everyone to use to convey information about traffic safety, and a general state of affairs.

Exasperated: The media landscape, overall, makes it very hard for this good piece of work to get into the eyeballs of the people who need it. I continue to be unsure about how to reduce the friction between government services and government communications and the people who need them. At some point about 15 years ago, social media was once the answer; but it was and still is opt-in to plug into social media channels. I don’t love the idea of forced communications—an uninstallable app on a smartphone, say—and the post office, while great in the 1950s is simply too slow.

Any thoughts, team?

Why Is Ontario Ripping Out Toronto’s Hard-Fought Bike Lanes? It’s Not About Traffic. by Michael Koy for Next City

The Toronto core and its suburbs are a North American battleground for more and better bike lanes. Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford, and Ontario’s Minister for Transport, Prabmeet Sarkaria, insist, with the confidence of someone wrong, that the bike lanes cause Toronto’s “traffic problems.” Instead, the better and correct solution is to build more highways to funnel suburban drivers into downtown. Koy’s article does a great job stating the problem, fact-checking it with evidence, and calling out where the narrative-pushers are intentionally or, more than likely, unintentionally, using bad numbers to draw incorrect conclusions. Read on.

Exasperated: This narrative is never about the numbers or the outcomes. It’s about control of the public space. Somehow, and continuously, drivers demand that the rest of the world cater to their every need and that traffic, and sitting in it, is a cardinal sin. Koy brings up an incorrectly defined and outdated statistic cited in the case against a bike lane network and more safety infrastructure: only 1.2% of people commute by bike to work in the Toronto region. Do you see the problem with using this number in this context?

Trump Administration Considers Halting Congestion Pricing by the very neutral, not totally biased, well-sourced Times staff et al.

Nope. We’re not doing this.

Exasperated: Seriously. Nope.

Comment below or always email me at samuel [dot] b [dot] sklar [at] gmail [dot] com.

Thanks again to Jeff Wood at The Overhead Wire for news inspiration. And to Katie Economou and Corrigan Salerno for feedback on the Mini-E. Make sure you’re following Katie’s work at AMPO and Corrigan’s work at Transportation for America.

This week was pretty exasperating. We had a new administration completely acid firehose the Federal apparatus by executive fiat. We (people who give a shit) don’t expect every Executive Order to stick but a few will. The terrifying part is the stochastic errorism1 by which this administration wants to make a mess.

What is an Executive Order (EO)?

Friend of EI, Katie Economou, sent me an email that sums it up succintly.

• “Executive Orders (EOs) are official documents … through which the President of the United States manages the operations of the Federal Government.” The directives cite the President’s authority under the Constitution and statute (sometimes specified). EOs are published in the Federal Register, and they may be revoked by the President at any time. Although executive orders have historically related to routine administrative matters and the internal operations of federal agencies, recent Presidents have used Executive Orders more broadly to carry out policies and programs.”

• While EOs have the force of law within the executive branch, they are constrained by existing statutes and constitutional authority.

• There are several limitations to EOs. They cannot:

  • Create new laws

  • Appropriate funds

  • Contradict or repeal existing laws

• If an EO exceeds presidential authority or conflicts with existing laws, it can be challenged in court and potentially invalidated.

Immediately, this administration issued an EO, called “Unleashing American Energy,”2 effectively and abruptly pausing EVERY project authorized by the IRA and IIJA through the “administrative matters” clause, kinda. I understand—and vehemently disagree with—but I understand the policy “platform” that seeks to roll back environmental goals. Still, the stupid wording written by stupid people (or ChatGPT) could not be stupider. I am unclear whether any of this has been fully or partially walked back as of yet, but fortunately, (?) federal transportation funding works in arrears for contract work, meaning the states—or other sponsors—get reimbursed for the spending on a project approved by the feds. Essentially, all projects funded with federal dollars are built on an IOU basis.

There are pros and cons to this system, but that’s not the point. The problem isn’t the change in policy or even the change in process—we desperately need process change—the problem is the uncertainty that comes with Stupid Federalism. Likely, the process will have smoothed out by the time the bills come due—but where’s the recourse if the states (or MPOs or other eligible Fed-aid recipients) have spent this money expecting a reimbursement and then find out that, no, there’s no money to reimburse them because they didn’t follow the Stupid EO? There simply is none.

We’re at this crossroads now where every single outstanding dollar is being held up by ossified norm: this is how we did things and it takes a few minutes to undo them so for now everything is _trending_ bad, but ultimately okay. Until it’s not. The doubleplus ungood problem I have, as usual, is the clear lack of communication and recourse pathing for how to fix this problem. States left holding the bag is one thing—there are ways to raise money relatively quickly, even if it comes at the expense of future spending (interest rates, municipal bond markets flooding/oversupply, no appetite, bailout cultures, etc.)—but non-State entities? F*cked.

These masochistic fools want chaos. They want our systems in disarray. These ghouls want the following to happen to ratf*ck us out of the dollars we give to fund the necessary systems that keep our country afloat so they can have more for themselves. The goal is to privatize everything and burn the place to the ground.

What is regulatory capture?

“The concept of Regulatory Capture (Reg Capture) typically refers to a phenomenon that occurs when a regulatory agency that is created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate an industry or sector the agency is charged with regulating. When regulatory capture occurs, the interests of firms or political groups are given priority or favor over the interests of the public.”

Corruption is the missing word here because the effective extension of regulatory capture is privatization and the nail-scraping of the public good off the chalkboard.

When is enough enough? I truly don’t understand this hoarding and privatization model from a velocity of money perspective. Our brains can’t fathom how much a billion dollars is—and there’s literally no time to spend all that money. It’s not like they’re contributing to noblesse oblige, Carnegie-like public spending. They’re not building libraries or institutions. There’s no indication they’re willing to spend a dime on lifting people out of poverty or working toward curing disease or famine. But really, what’s the point?

Not one of these Executive Orders has been for any sort of Greater Good—even one you and I disagree with—and we desperately need resistance. Here’s the infrastructure hook: we may need to turn away from the Fed for a bit and look to pare down our big ideas to focus on the knots that tie the rope together.

This means: making our streets work for all of us; and investing in sustainable technologies and systems—both environmentally and economically—to make sure that the things we want match the things we can do in perpetuity. This means: building mutual aid wherever possible and building plans based on dignity at their core. This means: not giving up even when the world is on fire.

Solution: we must protect our institutions at all costs. We rely on norms and heuristics to piecemeal our way through the fractured peaks of the hell that we ourselves have built for us. For the next four years, we can assume the Fed will be as unhelpful as possible; but we’re a republic of states and a nation of individuals with, in theory, a birthright to self-determination. Here’s what I do know: mutual aid will be the most important thing you can do with your time. If you can help someone, do it. If you can make someone’s life a little easier, do it. If you can be out in the world, remembering that there’s no reason we’re all here but the sun feels good, go do it. Bring friends.

Also, ride transit so we can convince people that it’s the best.

Articles I liked this week.

Special shoutout to Jeff Wood at The Overhead Wire for continuing to curate the best place to find new articles about _all things cities_. There’s a free trial but the $35/year for a weekly round-up is such a great resource for all your needs.

Time’s up! What wins has Biden notched and what has he left incomplete on transportation?

Benito Pérez, Transportration for America blog

This blog post acts as a post-mortem on specifically Transportation for America’s priorities for a Biden-era DOT. The verdict: extremely mixed results that lean toward ineffective at best. Yes, a few of the discretionary (competitive) grants from 2021’s transportation funding reauthorization were meaningfully deployed (this blog calls out Reconnecting Communities—likely axed literally immediately) and there was movement on greenhouse gas emissions standards. Very little on anything else.

Exasperated: This is terribly deflating because 47’s DOT will certainly not move on any programs and projects T4 cares about. There’s going to be a huge clawback of even the middling funds—electric vehicles—as they relate to mobility, access, sustainability, etc. But expect no dollars to go toward repairing the damage our past selves have done and compounded unto ourselves.

Why Americans Don’t Walk: A Forgotten Centennial by Peter Norton for Streetsblog

Peter Norton is the preeminent transportation historian and this article is another shouldn’t-be-arcane-but-is centanniversary. A hundred years ago, Peter writes, we were a country of pedestrians—even, especially, in Los Angeles. The introduction of the first anti-pedestrian law, one that gave the balance of power over to motorists3 and gave way to a national epidemic of greedy pro-driving, anti-walking ordinances. The people who wrote these laws: car dealership owners.

Exasperated: *Unbelievable!* *Shocking!* The needs of private capital overrule the general welfare of the public space. We must always remember that drivers are also pedestrians for a not-insignificant portion of their journey so we love to see a general public act against its own self-interest. Time continues to be a flat circle, no?

The real takeaway here is the stubborn length of time that our policymakers and rule mavens simply refuse to engage in facts at the behest of private capital, whose interests are not aligned with the collective good. Y’all should really read Karl Marx. In fact, leave this blog and go listen to David Harvey read Marx.

School Dropoff Is Everything That Sucks About Car Culture by Anna Zivarts for Romper

The school pick-up/drop-off line is a perfect example of the fight over physical and mental space and how much effort we spend arguing over disputed points—oh wait they’re not really disputed, but we just assume the needs of drivers are paramount to the needs of literally every other road / space user. Anna argues that there are, in fact, other options besides driving a kid or group of kids to school, including free or reduced-fare/subsidized transit, biking, or a more robust, equitable school bus system. The benefits to investing even a little in a mode other than driving are enormous. Read to find out more.

Exasperated: There’s nothing I like more than seeing a friend of Exasperated Infrastructures in the wild. Anna Zivarts, a fantastic disability-rights activist (among so many other hats she wears, including the author of a fantastic book4 called “When Driving Is Not An Option.”)

Share

Other Things I’m Reading

Pete Buttigieg has a few things to say on his way out by Andrew J. Hawkins for The Verge.

A good Sec. May. Pete exit interview.

How the Trump Presidency Could Impact Urban Planning for Planetizen.

A good overview of Project 2025 and how it will impact the built environment—beyond transportation.

Enacting a Ticket Surcharge to Strengthen New York City’s Parks by John Surico and Eli Dvorkin for The Center for an Urban Future.

I attended an event on the morning of January 23rd with the authors of this paper (which builds off this paper and literally decades of advocacy from hundreds and thousands of people who care about our parks as one of the three cornerstones of NYC living5) and a panel of awesome thinkers, advocates, and elected officials6.

I’ve been thinking about this idea all day—paying for park maintenance (operations) through a modest surcharge on tickets to major league sports, theatre7, etc. and have tried to understand the metaphor for transportation. I’m still ruminating on it. Feels congestion pricing-y.

I’d like to start posting weekly again in 2025. I think that’s why you’re here. So, let’s recap how I’ll do a weekly post, likely between Wednesday and Friday. I’ll try to post it in the morning so you can read it with your coffee or during your commute.

📝A short (<500 words) thought of the week. This will likely be a reaction to some story, an attempt to pull some words out of my head about something I noticed that week, a guest spot—something. But it will be editorial in nature.

✏ One to five news articles or other essays summarized and annotated and contextualized.

💭 A recommendation of another newsletter or person of interest to follow.

Federal Discretionary Grants Are Good And Worth Talking About Forever

We’re as disjointed as ever in how we’re talking about our national infrastructure. Last week, Secretary Buttigieg announced and released over $5 billion in discretionary grant awards across seven different programs. These competitive, limited grants will add federal funding to local and state dollars for over 560 projects across all 50 states, DC, and US territories. This announcement is a big deal. The flow of money from federal coffers to states and other non-Federal sources at this magnitude, is a big deal. Secretary Mayor Buttigieg’s last big act as leader of our transportation department is a big deal; it will leave a legacy.

I’m having trouble finding easy access to details about many of these projects. (Edit: I found RAISE project sheets.) But these RAISE grants are only a few dozen of the transformative projects that are sure to make a big splash for millions of people once planned and built announced in this omnibus press release. I’d like to see project details more front and centered on USDOT’s front page. I’d like our agencies to communicate the benefits of these projects more clearly and more often.

Local reporting can be a strong voice to help explain what it is we’re doing here. For example:

This paper reported, excitedly, on a project and an influx of cash that Niland likely doesn’t often get. Niland, CA is a <1,000 person, census-designated place (think: unincorporated population. It may act like a town but is often funded and operated by a county, like in this example) and now has the opportunity to spend $1.5 million on serious upgrades to its built environment. Each person who lives in Niland—or who passes through—will benefit from slower traffic and a “complete” street. This project will save lives and stir economic opportunity. It will do a lot of these things for a relatively low cost. This is a good project and we should fund 25,000 other ones just like it.

I’m hopeful that the other projects get a similar bump—the public deserves to know how their money is ostensibly being spent. I’m also hopeful that this isn’t the last article written about this project. Here’s hoping our press learns how to engage with the built environment and reports on it ‘til it’s done.

Share Exasperated Infrastructures

Some News Articles That Tickled Me This Week

Cincinnati's abandoned subway system and the ideas on what to do with it | Photos

This article is light on criticism but it’s fun to look at and it’s fun to imagine what to do with abandoned, unloved, underused, or otherwise carved-out infrastructure that’s not used for its original purpose. That’s what this article does and its photojournalism angle is effective because it shows not tells. There are a lot of ideas here.

Exasperation: No real criticism here but a few thoughts. It’s really rare that we get a chance to explore options like this; if a Subway isn’t viable—what is? And what do Cincinnatans want? This is going to be a really tough question to answer because, while compromise is essential for design, there can only be one real use for the space that effectively solves a problem (as to be identified during the design process).

Trump's Cabinet pick for secretary of transportation is Sean Duffy. Here's what to know.

This NPR article faithfully reports on likely-Secretary Sean Duffy for the Department of Transportation. He was pretty thorough in answering bipartisan concerns about continuances of funding, commitments to safety, and—though he’d voted against Amtrak funding as a Congressman—not dumping Amtrak from the funding stream.

Exasperation: Let’s see if his words match his actions, but Rep. Duffy feels like a pretty anodyne choice for Secretary. His lack of direct transportation experience may be an asset or may be a burden, depending on how he organizes the department to meet the very real and pressing concerns. I’m hoping safety remains as a top priority; I’m hoping our leaders can find a way to rebrand “environment” and “equity” as “economic development” and keep on keeping on. I’m hoping there’s a bipartisan and concerted approach to cutting red tape; I’m hoping that he realizes that bad process is his enemy, and not some “woke” agenda.

Chicago Agency Pitches $1.5 Billion Plan to Fix Transit Woes

There’s a massive funding shortfall between how much Chicago’s transit agency needs to spend and how much money it has to spend to run a meaningful service. The RTA—the Regional Transit Authority—that oversees three of Chicago area’s services has asked for a lot of local and state cash to help fill this gap. The Authority is also considering a fare increase to help bridge this gap.

Exasperation: This is the doozy of all doozies: to give RTA more funding or bleed it out; these are the two options often presented to create some scarcity narrative. This works to embolden anti-transit advocates (“It’s too expensive!” “It can’t pay for itself!” “Why should I pay for a service I don’t use!”) and put transit boosters into a frenzy (“The system will implode without this cash infusion!” “We’re in a death spiral!” “The system’s not supposed to pay for itself—it costs money to run a public service!”). It’s not that these ideas are simply orthogonal—they exist at right angles to each other—it’s that the two “teams” aren’t playing the same game.

One fights for sustainable funding and economic opportunity and a shared vision for the future; the other doesn’t acknowledge the fight at all. Transit is simply a disease to be sliced from our public discourse.

But imagine Western Avenue with no BRT?

Share

Miscellany

💡Tara Grescoe’s new tack toward high-speed rail reporting. I’ve been a big fan since “Straphanger” (The Book). Subscribe here.

💡Andrew Hawkins is fast to the story about the two brothers tracking congestion pricing. Here.

💡Just a reminder the MTA has a fun Data & Analytics blog that’s updated semi-regularly. It puts a friendly face on the organization’s quasi-black box. I check it when I see it on LinkedIn, or when I’m crafting a very fun post for you on this very newsletter.

Shabazz Stuart is one of our great entrepreneurs. His work to help reduce friction and create a safer ecosystem for cyclists across the New York region is unparalleled. He’s a tireless worker, a great connector, and a friend of nearly five years. And his post below—clipped from Threads—is exactly spot on.

The NYC Council Bill in question can be viewed here. Its full text is below. Before I get into the “how policy works and doesn’t section” of this Mini Exasperation, let’s line-edit this.

Section 1. Subchapter 3 of chapter 1 of title 19 of the administrative code of the city of New York is amended by adding a new section 19-176.4 to read as follows:

The action. This is what this law is effectively doing. It’s rewriting or amending the rulebook for New York.

§ 19-176.4 Licensing and registration of bicycles with electric assist, electric scooters and other legal motorized vehicles. a. For the purposes of this section, the following terms have the following meanings:

Bicycle with electric assist. The term “bicycle with electric assist” means any electric bicycle as defined in section 102-c of the vehicle and traffic law.

Electric scooter. The term “electric scooter” means any electric scooter as defined in section 114-e of the vehicle and traffic law.

Other legal motorized vehicle. The term “other legal motorized vehicle” means any wheeled device powered by an electric motor or by a gasoline motor that may be legally operated in the city, is not capable of being registered with the New York state department of motor vehicles and is not a bicycle with electric assist or electric scooter.

Definitions of how they’re used in relation to this legislative action. They may or may not align with a common definition or a definition that’s used anywhere else. It’s important to understand this aspect of law versus human.

b. Every bicycle with electric assist, electric scooter and other legal motorized vehicle shall be registered with the commissioner and provided a distinctive identification number and a license plate corresponding to that distinctive identification number.

This section demands that every motorized vehicle now must be registered with the city. Note the text doesn’t specify exactly how this has to happen and _also_ note that “registered with the commissioner” does not mean registered with the _State-run_ DMV. This is otherwise straightforward: if you own or operate one of these vehicles as defined above, the administrative state now needs to know about it. Can’t see how that could go wrong.

c. The license plate issued pursuant to subdivision b of this section shall be of such material, form, design and dimensions and contain such distinguishing number as the commissioner shall prescribe, provided, however, that there shall be at all times a marked contrast between the color of the plate and that of the numerals or letters thereon. Each such plate shall identify whether the bicycle with electric assist, electric scooter or other legal motorized vehicle is personal or commercial in nature. The fee for such plate shall be determined by the commissioner.

This is seemingly to prevent ghost plates from circumventing the law because the law was not specific enough to compel the issuing authority (DOT?) from issuing incredibly stupid plates.

d. The license plate issued pursuant to subdivision b of this section shall be conspicuously displayed on the rear of the bicycle with electric assist, electric scooter or other legal motorized vehicle, and securely fastened so as to prevent the same from swinging. No bicycle with electric assist, electric scooter or other legal motorized vehicle shall display any plate other than that issued by the commissioner.

A very specific detail about license plate placement. Who brought this up? Is this a huge issue?

§ 2. This local law takes effect 120 days after it becomes law.

Sure.

Ah! But wait—there’s a concurrent bill loitering in the New York State Assembly that is almost identical in text, but adds language about registration fees and related fines:

Section 1. This act shall be known and may be cited as "Priscilla's law".

Politicians often name their proposed bills and laws to tie it to a person or event. It’s very effective politicking. Knowing nothing about why it’s called this, I’m not going to deny that Priscilla’s family _deserved_ safe streets before what I can only surmise was a serious incident.

§ 2. The vehicle and traffic law is amended by adding a new section 1244 to read as follows:

§ 1244. Registration of bicycles with electric assist. 1. Every bicycle with electric assist as defined in section one hundred two-c of this chapter shall be registered and issued a number plate by the department.

The sentiment here is the same as the City law—catalog and register your e-bike with the _State_

No person shall operate a bicycle with electric assist unless such bicycle with electric assist shall have a distinctive number assigned to it by the commissioner and a number plate issued by the commissioner with a number corresponding to that of the certificate of registration.

Nearly identical to the City law, too.

2. Such number plates shall be of such material, form, design and dimensions and contain or set forth such distinguishing number or other identification marks as the commissioner shall prescribe, provided, however, that there shall be at all times a marked contrast between the color of the number plates and that of the numerals or letters thereon.

Each such number plate shall be conspicuously displayed on the rear of the bicycle, securely fastened so as to prevent the same from swinging.

Identical.

4. The fee for such number plates shall be determined by the commissioner.

5. Where there is a violation of this section, the fine for such violation shall be determined by the commissioner.

Fees and fines were not included in Councilman Holden’s NYC bill, but they’re included here. Curious if the omission is an oversight or left out because there’s no budget authority or enabling revenue legislation to set up a plates-and-fines system.

That these bills are concurrent poses interesting Federalism questions i.e. for a geography represented by overlapping authority1. There’s no acknowledgment of either bill in the other one—the city bill doesn’t cite the state bill or vice versa—and that’s not necessarily an issue, yet. I’d wager that during reconciliation between the Assembly, Senate, and the City Council there will be some level of horse-trading compromise that either preempts the city from registering vehicles or shares some of the responsibility.2

For now, let’s talk about how dumb this law is through THREE lenses:

• Problem identification and appropriate solutions

• Politics and community engagement

• Administration and implementation of the law

First: problem ID and available solutions. Not for nothing, the people who write and amend our laws are often neither particularly proactive nor engaged with the array of issues that hit their desks on an hourly basis; the first is a function of incentive and the second is why Councilors employ staff and experts depending on their seniority and committee assignment. It is normal for Councilors to know a little about a lot, nothing about some, and a lot about a little.

What is not normal is the complete lack of critical thinking skills, whether on purpose or not, and the aloof, lack of engagement with the real problems underwriting the law they want to propose. The _dozens_ of sponsors believe or may actually be acting in good faith, but the “draconian, regressive, and ineffective” law that Shabazz Threaded about above doesn’t feel connected to the deeper problem it’s claiming to address.

Prima facie, this bill feels like it’s aimed at a challenge many New Yorkers decry daily: e-bikers and scootees not following the “rules of the road” and causing or being involved in traffic incidents. The sheer number of e-bikers who use the device for work adds to the number of pleasure riders or commuters hovers in the dozens-of-tens-of-thousands: the yearly trips will likely cross 300,000,000(!) in the next few years. There’s certainly going to be conflict based on this massive number and entropy. Some idiot will do a dumb thing and trigger a crash—rarely, but still too often—this crash or incident is fatal. Sometimes everything goes literally, terribly wrong and there’s no obvious fault.3 More often, there’s an incident among the modes—bike, pedestrian, and automobile—with an injury or property damage.

So the problem is: too many incidents; too many injuries and too much death; too much property damage that often goes unresolved. But are these the problems…

…

…or are they symptoms of a larger structural issue that’s transportation-, labor-, immigration-, etc. related? What is the actual problem we’re trying to solve here without introducing more problems, which we’ll get into in a few bullets?

The actual problem is that our streets are only designed to move motor vehicles (including e-bikes?????) as quickly as possible; our public space is automatically offered to these motor vehicles, for no additional cost, to store them. New Yorkers love fast and cheap delivery. The e-bikers are often poorer and live further from economic opportunity than an average New Yorker. The bikes they use are unsafe at any speed.4

When we insist on addressing the wrong problem, the wrong solutions bubble up. Even if registering these e-bikes made it easier for the City/State to track their riders…what now? How does that address the safety challenge? The outcome is likely to be fewer cyclists on our streets, which reduces the critical mass required to encourage safety.

SO: if road design, curb management, and allocation of public space are the problem —the solution should require road redesign, tactical projects, reallocation of assets and usage of space, and ultimately encourage more cycling. As it stands, this bill will do none of these things.

Second: Politics and community. The fact that this bill has dozens of co-sponsors—33 needed to prevent a veto—is a testament to deeply held prejudices and successful bad-faith campaigns and perhaps, people lobbied or logrolled to trade votes to fulfill the vendetta. In this instance there’s Punnett Square we’ll use to discuss this phenomenon.

There’s a lot of Do Not Know/Care and Know/Do Not Care overlap here. It’s what’s preventing a clear message of how to counter this bill from circulating. The strange bedfellows phenomenon is obfuscating the pathway to kill this bill. For example, both Chi Ossé (D-Brooklyn) and Vickie Palladino (R-Queens) are both co-sponsors of this bill.5 These two Councilors couldn’t be more opposed as legislators—but what’s going on here that’s made both of them sign on to veto-proof this bill? Are we really to believe that this is bipartisanship at work and is it really bipartisanship “working as intended” if everyone is bipartisanly wrong?

The constituency represented by the smattering of Councilors, Senators, and Assemblypeople is diverse and there’s no common thread to connect them all: there are the deliveristas/delivery people who ride their e-bikes and motorized scooters for work; commuters who ride to get to work; pedestrians who just want to walk and not get run down by a careless cyclist; drivers who are just so angry at everything and then not, once they park; businesses and storefronts who rely on these cyclists; tourists who ride Citibike; manufacturers and resellers (totally different) of the devices themselves—and ancillary component providers (helmets???, batteries, panniers, etc.).

There are progressives who want meaningful laws to protect public safety and enhance access to opportunity; “progressives” who want to look like they’re helping, but instead just complain that they can’t park for free wherever they want; crusaders who think that the street and access to asphalt is their right for free forever, simply because they’ve spent money on a personal vehicle; opportunists who ride waves of emotion to political gain; chaos agents capitalists goobers who just want to watch the streets descend into chaos so they can peddle an app to “fix it”; centrists who want everyone get along; conservatives who want to define what freedom of movement means based on their own, limited worldview; “conservatives” who are just sorta mean and a little dumb; and everyone who has a little sprinkle of a lot of these qualities and leanings.

Where’s the community for this? On what grounds did these politicians logick themselves into this position and what’s the consensus/consent argument that gets them to back off? This problem will resolve itself?

No, these bills are seen as action against a problem that’s seen as worthwhile. On its face, they are—and that’s insidious. But the people who have made the problem are also defining the meaning of the world problem. Who watches The Watchmen if there are no Watchmen but we believe there are because the watchers say there are?

Third: Administration and implementation.

The practical reason these bills are doomed to the dumbwaiter of delusion is the implementation and action (and money and time) required to administer them. I’m going to structure this question as a series of questions that haven’t been answered yet.

1. Who is going to pay for any of this?

   Without a dedicated funding source, this type of law is called an unfunded mandate at all levels of government. The City/State directs its administrative organizations/authorities to act on the law that compels them to…but doesn’t identify a source of funds or underfunds the activity. Seriously. Standing up a new project inside a rigid organization that requires a lot of coordination is not particularly challenging but it could be expensive to make sure it’s done correctly, once. But maybe nonce.

2. How will the responsible agencies generate these dollars?

   There’s something smaller here that astute readers should also want to know: how are these dollars generated? Federally, the failsafe that no one recommends is literally printing the money with the full faith and credit of the US Government. States, it turns out, are not allowed to print their own money. So the money must come from: an additional tax or a reallocation of other funds. It would be helpful for our bill sponsors to identify these sources and then allocate them to anything else.

3. Who implements the rules set forth in the law?

   Who is ultimately responsible for bringing the law from zero to not-zero? This one feels tricky considering the concentric nature of the bills. If the City passes the law and the State does not, DOT will likely need to be responsible for implementing the Council’s will. But…DOT has never registered vehicles before and there’s no expertise built in. If the State passes the bill and the City does not, there will likely be a new vertical inside the DMV, which saddles an already strapped organization with new responsibilities. Still: this process already exists…but does this then apply to all e-bikes across the State? Either way, the administration and marketing of this plan feel expensive, don’t they? All these agencies have better things to do with their time.

4. Who enforces them?

   Laws require enforcement, or they’re just…suggestions. Do we want to organize enforcement within DOT? Or do we want to saddle the police with MORE BUDGET to run down unlicensed e-bikes? This feels like a job for the City even if the State registers the vehicles. But how do all these organizations coordinate and collaborate to make sure enforcement is equitable and the strong arm of the law isn’t simply used to bully immigrants, low- or non-English speakers, and poorer New Yorkers? This bill doesn’t smell right to me—EVEN IF—the intent isn’t predatory there are unintended consequences that might divide New Yorkers even more than we’re already headed. Instead, we can ununintend them.

5. What metrics and measures of success prove this policy’s merit?

   How do we measure the success of this program? Is it “number of vehicles registered per ____,” because honestly, who cares? Is it the delta between crashes and serious injuries before and after the program’s implementation? How do we know what level of impact the law will have on street safety? Is it the number of insurance claims filed because the incidental parties can know more information about the crash? What is this? How does this help anyone? Bueller?

6. How does all of this get reported?

   It doesn’t. These bills are stupid as hell. Shabazz is right. Go check out Oonee.

Share Exasperated Infrastructures

So, we’ve seen this comic, right? I wanted to share it and not be a total pill, but I have some thoughts:

• The spacing of the text/comic bubbles first caught my eye here. I’m not totally sure that it was totally intentional, but it rings very true to my experience here that people with culturally driven opinions tend to be very quick to judge and double down, and people whose worldview is consciously crafted and changes relatively frequently based upon new evidence tend to be much less quick to judge. A small factoid.

• I know it’s easy to ring the Netherlands bell as often as possible when we talk about the streets we want as an advanced society. Streets that put the person’s safety, dignity, and equity first over the need to drive a car as fast as possible and store it as free as possible. It’s a correct take, but it’s not as simple as wanting this to be true—car culture is systematic, and the same contextually-driven problems that compelled the Dutch government into a systemic change …

Read more

‘We Don’t Look Ready’ Janette Sadik-Khan is worried about getting congestion pricing right. by Justin Davidson

“But if congestion pricing isn’t accompanied by new amenities, it will betray the promise that was made. And if we’re not ready for it, we’ll be looking at a historic unforced error.” We’re so going to mess this up, aren’t we?

Stumbling Into Submission: How Real Estate And Finance Capital Conquered New York City by Katelin Penner

A really, just well-written, information-laden article from this up-and-comer! “After all these years, New York City is still investing in profit, not people.” Amen.

Transform Transit: a cooperative board game about bureaucracy by Laurel Paget-Seekins

This game looks…like something I would play. Well well well if it isn’t the consequences of our own actions…

That’s all folks. Have a good weekend!

Read more

Kea Wilson’s reporting is always excellent, but this piece caught my eye this morning for a few reasons. First: I’ve been harping about this idea for years. Sometimes, and not all times, a poorly designed bike lane makes cycling less safe than simply no change to the road infrastructure at all. Like most concepts in transportation, this idea is counterintuitive and is harder to communicate without diving into data and building an entire campaign around challenging the narrative from the right and the left side of the “biking issue,” or whatever we’ll call it.

Second: the reported piece could use some additional editorial comment, taking nothing away from Kea’s reporting, and in fact, hoping to add to it. The comment is this: unprotected bike lanes confound the shared language of the street. What do I mean by that?

Every street—and sometim…

Read more

Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/land-purchases-solano-county.html

Read more

I saw this article from Governing and I thought of two things in this order:

1. This is really interesting research and an interesting paradigm to rethink the teams that make transportation decisions. I agree with the author’s interpretation and the original research inputs, controls, methods, and outcomes.

2. This research is completely bunk and is already in the ether.

Here’s what did it for me—this chart is ridiculous. First of all, it’s too complicated. If I’m reading this correctly, education is the most important individual effort you can take but has the least impact on the population's health. Are these two factors related? I don’t think so, but there’s got to be a better way to show this.

Read more

I desperately want to move to Seattle. At some point, I’ll just make the move. I love New York, and it’s my home and will forever be, but there’s something nostalgic and romantic about the remoteness of the Pacific Northwest. It still feels like a secret to be here, despite almost 800,000 people in on it. The types of people I’ve met here have ranged from stereotypically standoffish to the most welcoming and adventurous I’ve met anywhere I’ve been. Most people have shades and dotted lines of both. There’s the other axis—those born and raised here and those who have made the conscious choice to move here. I’d like to be one of those people and help the state, region, and city provide a quality of transportation such that grandma can take a bus (or two) from Columbia City to Ballard and that grandson can get to a hike without owning a car. …

Read more

Hothouse 2.0

How to make high-speed rail a reality in the US 🚆

Climate Solutions // ISSUE #86 // HOTHOUSE 2.0 Hello dear readers, Thank you so much to those of you who elected to support Hothouse in its next iteration last month. To kick off Hothouse’s more zealous look at how individuals can advance systemic solutions to climate change, today’s dispatch broaches the subject of high-speed rail…

Read more

3 years ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Cadence Bambenek

Everyone! writes and edits an amazing climate solutions newsletter called “Hothouse 2.0” and she recently enlisted me to write a 2-parter on high-speed rail. Go read, like, and share it. Hopefully, you’ll learn something new or hopefully, you’re already writing a comment to tell me where I’ve missed a crucial detail.

Have a great weekend!

Read more

I’m in Seattle for the week (hi Julie Timm, Franz Loewenherz, Anna Zivarts!) and I noticed a new shared mobility option: car-share by the minute called GIG. I don’t think this a totally new concept, but it’s one I don’t often see in New York and I haven’t obviously seen it in other places I’ve traveled in the US. I did see it in London. The specific use case: my traveling buddies and I needed to move heavy luggage from their flat to the Crystal Palace Overground station relatively quickly. A rideshare was too expensive, walking or biking wouldn’t have worked and a full-day or even an hour-long car rental made no sense—too expensive. This option was the type of car-mobility solution that had a perfect use case.

A question is: can it scale? You’ve got to think that this can’t be profitable—so what’s the incentive? I asked the same thing abo…

Read more

Seriously it looks like it was designed in about 12 minutes. I’m not sure I have a lot more to add to this except to direct you to David’s pointed commentary for CityLab earlier this week. I’m particularly intrigued by this:

Significant though it was, the arrival of ride-hailing can only tell us so much about how cities now handle new technology ventures that are locally regulated. Startups that have tried to copy the Uber playbook (i.e., converting early users to become lobbyists) have met limited success; in 2019 Airbnb unsuccessfully sought to mobilize its “hosts” to defeat restrictions in Jersey City, New Jersey. Bird initially hoped to blitzscale its way toward electric scooter domination — hiring Uber lobbying veteran Bradley Tusk to lead the charge — but today it, like other …

Read more