On Journalism

 A generation past, old journalists taught young journalists that there are always two sides to any issue, and showing both was necessary for 'objective' journalism. Which has been perverted into ensuring that relevant political factions get equal airtime (without regard to objectivity or relation to reality). 

America would be better off with a more British adversarial partisan journalism which isn't objective and doesn't falsely claim to be. Adopting the regulatory standards from broadcast television news, where limited spectrum resulted in a limited number of stations practically inviting regulated monopolies, is almost accidental. It was purely a legacy of big semi-monopoly corporates borrowing a model from others in a related industry as they were bought out by private owners in a class private equity / corporate empire play.

Prior to the web, publishing meant actually manufacturing physical objects, using capital machinery, which was capital intensive, while providing content meant managing a lot of human capital, in an enterprise with enormous economies of scale. Quasi-monopolies were almost natural.  But there was absolutely no reason 'print' journalism needs to follow that model today.

It's not by accident that the web keeps seeing new publishing platforms emerge--news groups, websites, blogs, microblogs, social media, short-form video. Technological improvement is part of the game, but so is that the fact that private capital keeps trying to achieve return on investment by using network effects to scale to ubiquity and then extract monopoly rents. (We also see billionaires buying platforms to silence critics and acquire vanity assets: see Twitter and the Washington Post). Hence, BlueSky--not just a clone of Twitter, but a competitor designed to be invulnerable to being bought out. 

There are also the issues of censorship and content theft. Archive of Our Own (AO3) exists because LiveJournal purged sketchy content to make it more attractive to advertisers and hence investors. SubStack exists because blog traffic was being compromised by AI summaries of its best content. 

Again, there is no need for print journalism to make any effort to be objective, as there can be an infinite array of journalism providers on the web. In which environment, journalism can be as radical as it likes--infinite speciation to fill infinite infinitesimal niches, optimized through evolutionary selection. 

Rather than being objective, journalism should be informative. It should tell you something you didn't know before, even if it's only in a Jane-Austin-whose-daughter-has-married-whose-son sort of way. Good journalism will always be investigative, providing not just the facts, but the context necessary to understand implications of the facts. Really Good journalism is transformative - when new facts are used to demonstrate the limits of what someone previously thought they knew and create a new understanding that synthesizing both old and new understanding. Bad journalism is merely confirmatory - it affirms what you already knew is correct. Really Bad journalism is enabling delusion - reinforcing what you already know to be correct, even when that understanding is wrong. 

Present diatribes against 'fake news' and 'woke culture' exists in direct response to the threat that exposure to Really Good Journalism presents to Really Bad Journalism using a 'purity culture' technique to quarantine information by labeling it or its source as 'bad' or 'shameful' or 'sinful'. (If you are seeing a parallel to people getting 'cancelled' it's not by accident - extremists at both ends of the political spectrum use exclusion and denial an boycott as a threat. 

There is a delusion among major new outlets that they can avoid this by being objective, but that is a pursuit of false ideal and a financial dead-end. Nothing can ever be 'objective' enough to satisfy the zealots who are the partisan drill sergeants--their job is to find something wrong in order to find something they can use as a basis for discipline and punishment. 

That most journalism is supported by advertisement is both tonic and poison. A tonic, because money doesn't have an ideology. And poison, because almost no one who buys advertising wants to be associated with a fringe position that might alienate potential buyers or induce a boycott. 

Together, this suggests we'll see two forms of journalism: the apolitical (or at least unaligned) journalism about 'Topics' and facts about those topics, and the ever-more unhinged 'Narrative' journalism focused on emphasizing some facts and deprecating others in order to privilege a preferred political narrative. In neither form of journalism is 'objectivity' relevant. For Narrative journalism, it's fundamentally contrary to its purpose. And for 'Topics' journalism, no one is going to care about objectivity -- the watch you trust is the one that tells the time best. And perhaps this already exists today, and the real frission we are seeing is the interstice between the two. And as a human writing about things, your only real question is if you are writing something that is informative, investigative, transformative-- or confirmatory and enabling.

 

Twitter & BlueSky

One of the reasons this blog is comparatively nearly devoid of content for 2021-2024 was caused by devoting a lot of my attention to Twitter. I find X.com a far inferior platform, but for those curious about past tweets. 

Active on BlueSky as well, but from a 'writing is thinking' perspective, I've found that the 300-character batches is a non-always-helpful limitation. 

Chunking utterances into 300 characters supports brevity and clarity in communication, as each utterance must stand on its own, but impairs composition when trying to articulate thoughts and aggregate related ideas. 

Accordingly, most threads run stream-of-consciousness, and folks who can be articulate in that matter are rare, a lot of what is posted is dreck*. So useful as a 'public conversation', with people responding to one another, but less useful in generating comprehensive things for people to respond to. 

(Being articulate on the fly is a pretty good indicator of expertise. Means someone has articulated something before and done so enough times that articulating that understanding no longer imposes a substantial cognitive burden). 

Hence, more content in 2025/2026.

An American-style 'union station' is a worst-case outcome

 An American-stye 'union station' is a worst-case outcome - a traditional terminal head station for multiple non-connecting railroad companies. Yet even after our commuter roads fell into public ownership, we kept the same operating paradigm, rather than exploring through-running. I anticipate part of which is a matter of station architecture--not design for thru-running, it's difficult to implement. But I suspect a greater part is institutional, that "The Purpose of Commuter Rail is Bringing Commuters to the CBD" and that was as much thought as went into it. 

City planners don't design roads

City planners don't design roads. Traffic engineers do, and they explicitly follow geometric design manuals produced by a clubbish non-profit named AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials), whose rules are then adopted by FHWA, which then makes them a requirement for local DOTs, who then make them a requirement for cities and counties. And even in cases when places are not required to use the AASHTO standards (non-federally funded roads), traffic engineer (mis)-apply the standards because they don't have anything better. 

This is despite the fact that most roads mileage is not, in fact, Federally funded. The vast majority of roads, by functional class, are local roads in subdivisions, the design of which is governed by local subdivision ordinances, which are the province of standards set by local engineers. The total thought that goes into them consists of two concerns: 1) "They should be wide enough for two cars to pass, even with people parked on both sides", and 2) "They should be good enough to last a long time without the city needing to rebuild them". Fire marshal concerns about fire access - routes to get to houses from a fire station being too long or circuitous -- also influence design. City planning only gets involved when a city has had issues with too curb cuts onto highways, or traffic lights too close together. It's fair to blame city planners for every land use problem, but city planners have remarkably little to do with roads. 

NIMBY Defined

 A NIMBY is someone who understands that the financial benefit of development to someone else outweighs any price they would be willing to pay to prevent that development and so attempt to achieve the same ends more cheaply by making nebulous claims of public harms. This inevitably entails claims of 'It could happen everywhere!', until it alarms enough people to gather sufficient political support to cause sufficient public clamor at a public meeting to intimidate council members. (This essential NIMBY tactic is my chief dispute with Missing Middle advocates. Upzoning everywhere threatens a lot of people with change).

A second standard NIMBY talking point is "Skyscrapers!" and "Manhattanization! and "East Coast!". Anyone who has actually traveled around the East coast can tell you that the pre-war urban core is dwarfed in scale by the surrounding suburbs, and that average density metropolitan density is quite low. But it's designed to cause fear, and it's almost always coupled with cries of "Crime! Renters!" like it's still 1980.

When the boomers are gone what will the appetite for cars look like?

 The 'appetite' for cars is going to decline. The boomers love affair with cars is based on a golden age when cars were cheap, gas was cheap, and roads were uncongested. The experience has been worse for each subsequent generation, such that Gen Z doesn't even like to drive and can't be bothered to get licenses. But we can't do away with cars -- dependence on them is baked into our built environment. 

How many careers revolve around the car as we know it?

Even if everything becomes EV and BEH, there will still be engines and cars to be maintained, and those vehicles will likely last longer, requiring their own maintenance specialists for body and brakes, rather than for the powertrain. 

If your city grows faster than its historic average it ceases to be able to meet its affordable housing needs through market-based filtering

If your city grows faster than its historic average it ceases to be able to meet its affordable housing needs through market-based filtering. High-income newcomers outcompete anyone lower on the income scale for rents, forcing everyone else down a rung on the ladder, and the bottom rung falls into homelessness. Then the stock of low-income housing decreases, as the competition for homes on the higher-income rungs makes it worthwhile to fix-up depreciated homes in good locations, and then in not-so-good locations. 

Before Euclid and Modern Suburbia.

 

Is there a good descriptor of how pre-Euclid and pre-modern suburbia raw development, that led to our great cities, actually worked?

People build kind of whatever they wanted. In Manhattan, the Astor's (richest people in America) abandoned their mansion on the edge of town and moved away because of the encroach of working-class high-rises destroyed the neighborhood character. You had a legal right to build anything, and the only way your neighbor could do anything about it was by suing you for nuisance. And blocking someone's view or sunlight was not considered a nuisance.

But, I don't think Strong Towns is quite getting this quite correct when they broadly blame "regulations" and "financing" for how and why development is different today relative to some supposed historic "incremental" methodology.

Strong Towns is absolutely right in blaming regulations and financing for how and why development today is different. Euclid meant you could buy a house and know that no one was ever going to build a (smelly) glue factory next door. So, housing became a far safer investment. And that meant banks were willing to loan more money to more people. So, there was more demand for owner-occupied housing. SZEA and SCPEA made zoning more prevalent. But that wasn't enough. 

The GI bill made any returning veteran eligible for a subsidized mortgage. Prior to the GI Bill (Federally subsidized mortgages), a mortgage was 50% down and lasted 5 years. Afterwards, it was 5% down and lasted 30 years. By one estimate, half the adult male population had been in the military at that point. So huge numbers of people could afford to buy houses, setting off a massive surge in homebuilding, which made it into a real industry, and people started to apply the mass production methods used for war for housing production. (Levitt-town is famous for a reason). Streetcar suburbs had done something similar, but nothing like at the same scale--there hadn't been the finance to support the demand to support the scale to support the specialization.

Of course it is almost certainly some kind of change in "regulations" and/or how the government operates but I think this would be worth pinning down. If we want to go back to some supposed golden age we need to actually understand that golden age.

SZEA and SCPEA were enabling legislation - it made zoning less liable to legal challenge (Supremacy clause). And the GI bill provided the financing. But the government operations don't stop there. The whole paradigm of modern suburbia relies on government planned and funded freeways. How we did it was a bit tricky. Federal government can't legally own roads, so they passed legislation saying that any State with a DOT was eligible for a 90% construction subsidy for highways and also added a fuel tax. Lots of freeways were build, and combined with expanding auto-ownership, moving to a semi-rural suburban idyll with big yards and lots parking became available to many. (And for most boomers, that era is the Golden Age of their childhood). However, it came to a crashing end in 1973 with the Arab Oil Embargo, and the formation of OPEC. 

Canonically, when I think Chicago or New York, I think (maybe imagining) paper streets as far as the eye can read on maps read across miles of undeveloped land, or whatever the original townsite was. I know Jason Barr has some blog posts at building the skyline about the mapping and surveying of Manhattan, but it's light on the when, where and how of the actual infrastructure construction timing and its relation to the when, where, and how of the related building construction.

The Wikipedia Article on the 1811 Commissioners Plan is a good place to start. But It's critical to realize how minimal city infrastructure was until the Victorian era. The Croton aqueduct (1842) bringing fresh clean water to Manhattan was major civic achievement.  You don't have paved roads, water mains, piped gas, or even sewers for quite a long time. A road was where it was illegal to build, and it was dirt or mud with a ditch in the middle for stormwater for when it rained. Water came from the well in the back yard, probably with a latrine nearby, which probably emptied into the local creek. London itself doesn't get sewers until 1865. 

The building construction (multiple stories, half lot coverage) ran long before any kind of public infrastructure. Much the same in smaller towns. The house my dad grew up in dumped its sewerage directly into a local creek, via a cast iron pipe from the toilet, and had an old on-site well. You tended to see public infrastructure investment when property-specific system collapsed. Culinary water typically at the forefront - once the local watershed is polluted, there is no way to fix it. Sewers are an easy sell to voters - less smell. For paving, roads were paved using a system that looks very much like a Public Improvement District, levying a tax on houses fronting onto them. We owe a certain amount of paving to streetcar companies, for whom the franchise agreement allowing them to build a railway in the public right of way required them to pave it as part of the deal, and since they were already doing a lot of grading, earthwork, and water management to their own project, it wasn't a big deal. 

Highway paving was erratic and ad-hoc. The AAA maps don't refer to thinks as 'auto trails' without reason, and a journey from LA to Long Beach was an all-day excursion and mostly off-road. There was nominally a national highway system from 1926, but without attached funding it was a bit conceptual, and mostly a matter of signage, connecting bits of roads. 

Suburbia relies on highways. Suburban development relies on being able to link local suburban roads to the broader public network. Without public highways, travel to a new subdivision would be along a rutted rural dirt road, and thereby much less comfortable and far slower. Which meant such a location was less attractive, and so less rentable, and so not worth developing.

But really it was the scale of suburban development that mattered--building a subdivision meant an efficiency of scale that supported the develop of local infrastructure networks. By splitting the cost of a water main and sewer main over 30 houses with a sort of minimum spanning tree, you could afford to connect everyone to a local creek or sewer main. 

But part of what makes suburbia work is that it is a process - it's not just the one suburb, but the assumption that future suburbs will emerge. And that makes it worthwhile to make public infrastructure improvements in things like substations and public schools that would not otherwise be reasonable for a single suburb. 

We used to build plenty and it might be related to how we built differently. How, exactly?

Well, no. For a brief period, we built plenty. But that period was pretty brief, only a few decades. It seems like it went on for a long time because we repeated the same cycle in new places (The interstate didn't reach everywhere at once, and viability of continued interstate widening has varied based on terrain, climate, and public opposition).

It's really critical to understand what Strong Towns is about, and the name should be a clue--they are about towns. A town is a place where, after the initial settlement boom, the increase in local population is largely dependent on local natural increase. Which tends to be gradual, and so new housing development tended to be incremental. A space previously used for an orchard or garden or poultry yard would become a new house.

The style of structure built was also different. Financing was limited (five years with 50 percent down) so everyone tended to build a small house and add to it over time, adding and enclosing porches to all sides. "Barnacling" as Strong Towns calls it.

Prior to mortgages, a starter home in the twenties might consist of a of a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and living room (where the children would sleep). A larger house might have a front parlor, dining room, kitchen, dining room, and two bedrooms. Laundry was done out of doors, porches were the 'mud rooms', and play took place wherever. The panoply of rooms that characterizes our houses today didn't exist.

After the GI bill, rather than incremental additions, you could afford to be like a rich person and build it all at once. And if a garage was attached and integrated into the house, that counted as part of the house, and that could be financed as well.

Prior to the GI Bill, households were also different. You lived with family until you got married, and once you had your own house, you had lodgers--siblings and cousins and extended family who provided domestic labor. And if you had any kind of money, you had live-in servants for whom you provided bed and board. A household was not a matter of relation--it was an economic unit. (You can still see this in early zoning codes, which forbid unrelated persons living together, excepting domestic servants). You took in boarders or lodgers inverse to your number of kids, and your youngest kid probably never moved out and stayed to care for you in your dotage. Or, if your daughter got married, you might move in with her to her new house.

Density isn't a choice--it's a market imperative

Density isn't a choice--it's a market imperative. When land is expensive, we built up. For 99% of human history, there was a structural limit on how high we could build. For 99.5% of human history, there was a transportation limitation. Streel frame skyscrapers conquered the first. Elevators conquered the second. At this point, how high we build is either a financial question (trade-offs between land-costs and building costs) or political one (how much of my sunlight can be neighbor block). Safety complaints are bunk - fire is irrelevant once you're no longer using an American-style wood ballon frame. 

What IS a choice is the land use and building typology. And we need to stop pretending otherwise. Jarrett Walker has done a lot of good work making explicit the frequency vs. coverage trade-off for transit. Someone needs to do the same thing for land use types. 

We can have something with good automotive access with good parking, good station access with direct corridors, or good pedestrian access with small blocks and a solid street-wall. 

With robotaxis, more VMT is inevitable. But perhaps, not much.

The simulations on robotaxis have been clear for years: more VMT is inevitable, because trip-ends are poorly matched to trip origins. If two people are going from home to work, that's four Origin-Destination trips, of which only two are ferrying people*. More miles on the road, but less demand for parking at destinations. 

Is that a worthwhile social trade-off? Ignoring the equity question ("Who benefits?"), and converting it all into something fungible (dollars), what's the value of a parking space versus the cost of road capacity? Answering that question requires bounding it in time and space: a parking space where, and VMT when. The value of a parking space in Manhattan could easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, while a parking space in rural west Virginia might actually be negative. Likewise, the cost of adding an additional car to the roadway at 3a is basically zero - the road is sized to serve peak hour traffic, and 90% of the time, isn't carrying anything like that volume. So as a thought experiment, say it's the peak hour and parking for a major league baseball event, where parking is $300 an hour for a prime spot. For the robotaxi user, not parking is a clear win - the cost of the trip might be $45, for a $90 round trip--still a huge win. But for society, what's the marginal cost of the additional VMT generated by the robotaxi moving to its next fare.  Extreme case is that it's pure dead-head - no outbound fare from the stadium and drives all the way back to where it picked up the last guy to start its next fare. 

Quick google suggests a value of 1.6 cents per mile for federal costs, plus .1-.5 per state. Call it two cents a mile. Say the stadium trip is 20 miles. So that's .02 * 20, or forty cents. 

Ride-hailing companies will argue that this is an absurd case, but empirical evidence has not been made broadly available. Published meta-analysis suggests robotaxis will generate more VMT, but not that much. Six percent is more than a rounding error, but far less than the 50% I've seen bandied about in the past. I suspect that it's density dependent - if you convert a whole city to ride-hailing, you get much better matching--the next pickup after a drop-off, the dead-head DO pair, is much lower. As a thought experiment, consider a city with only one robotaxi, taking fares on a more or less random basis. Adding a second robotaxi substantially increases the chance that time and place can be made to match, and adding a thousand robotaxis is exponentially better, as the DO distance and time match converge exponentially. 

But as with many urban schemes, the devil is in the details. Lots of schemes falter because while the end-state is optimal, a long-term project requires every intermediary stage to be sufficiently self-supporting to sustain itself if/when there is a pause in the progress of the scheme. In a way, that speaks well for the future of robotaxis--they've proven to be financially viable even at very low levels of penetration.

Also clarifies why Uber expanded from city to city only incrementally - it required massive subsidy (to drivers and passengers) to ensure sufficient market participants for the scheme to work in the first place. Lacking drivers, wait times would be analogous to that of phone-hailed taxis. But lacking a series of passengers, no driver will find it worth their while to make that first pickup. So the whole market had to be bootstrapped into existence.

Matching land use typology with transportation

All have the same density. Upper-left is motor-centric (maximizing surface parking), middle is streetcar oriented (access streets to rail station), lower left pedestrian-oriented courtyard urbanism. They all have a place, but we need to be better at matching our land use typology with transportation. 

Rail is a technical / industrial / complex

"With Japanese consulting and financing, parts of the railway were upgraded to a recognizable commuter network... elevated to remove level crossings. Japanese rolling stock was introduced, and staff received training". 

- Berend Schotanus

Interesting to hear of the Japanese industrial/technical/financial export of metros as an industrial/technical system. Very similar thing in Puerto Rico, except that it's CONUS-style highways rather than trains. But same pattern - development aid as industrial policy. Sponsor nation provides contingent financing which is used to purchase consulting expertise and supports the purchase of sponsor-manufactured vehicles. 

Half the battle for trains in America is overcoming the lack of a domestic railway industrial/technical complex--we have to import the material and the expertise, which generates political resistance to financing. Yet we lack the technical expertise to do it alone, and the market for rolling stock is too small (despite Buy America provisions!) to be sustainable.

I suspect we're seeing a widespread adoption of BRT in America not just because BRT is good (and it is) but also because it fits within our existing technical/industrial complex of building highway lanes and then running automobiles on them. 

Why Public Meetings are Terrible - A Kludge Stack of Anti-Design

Using scheduled in-person public meetings as your default method of public engagement is terrible -- practically designed to generate terrible outcomes. An open meeting with a public comment period is purely a forum for the naysayers to congregate and berate the city council, why creating an echo chamber where the naysayers get their view confirmed, generating a bitter group of people who (absurdly) claim the council ignored 'public opinion' and that democratic processes are being ignored. Which is absolute catnip for a specific variety of concern-trolling-click-bait-publishing 'local' journalist. 

We mandate public meetings because we wanted to do away with decisions being made in smoke-filled rooms on a nebulous basis. And then extended it to include public comment because meetings otherwise just become announcements of the policy made in smoke-filled rooms. But it's trivial to ignore comments made in public meeting, so we mandated that they be collected and made a matter of public record. And so we arrived at the Decide-Announce-Defend paradigm anyone who works in infrastructure is familiar with. 

We should recognize that this format is a sub-par outcome, a Rube Goldberg kludge of fixes-on-fixes, and not something any sane person would design to actually engage the public. 

Being a public official is tough--constantly asked to make important decisions on a multiplicity of topics on which lack technical expertise, and so you are really reliant on: A) what you staff says, and B) what your personal network says. So it is easy to get a skewed view of what the public supports or will at least accept, and how widespread opposition actually is. And public meetings only serve to make this worse, because of the availability bias---the only people you'll see is the NIMBY chorus, so opposition appears firm and monolithic. 

Which is one of the reason activism is so effective - just having one person show up at a meeting with a contrary point of view destroys the illusion created by availability bias. This dynamic works both ways--it's also the same technique climate denialists have used exploited to artificially induce doubt about an overwhelming scientific consensus. 

This also offers implications for how to effectively present to a public audience. Rhetorically, it's called "planting a naysayer" a. While you are presenting, you say: "My opponent will say" and then refute it. It's an incredibly effective technique, because it ties your refutation to any further reference of that issue. Example:

"Folks here will say that building more houses doesn't improve affordability, but the empirical evidence is clear: places that built more apartments have more affordable rent. The bigger the city, the more apartments you have to build to move the needle. Of course the effects of a scant handful of new homes is imperceptible". 

So when it comes to effective activism, it's really effective to have someone rhetorically competent go to any public meeting where public comment is permitted, stand up, and give their spiel. So if you want to spend money changing the world, that's an effective way to do it. 

South-of-Emigration-Creek-City?

Looking at the Salt Lake City Zoning Map [1], I idly wonder if Salt Lake wouldn't be a better off if it just transferred (de-annexed) everything south of Emigration Creek and East of 1700 E.  It's the part of the city characterized by houses zoned for 7000 SF and even 12,000 SF lots. It certainly complicates city politics. 

I suspect it's a non-starter for financial reasons--what city would want to lose the taxable revenue from the affluent suburbs its annexed? But I also suspect were Urban3 to do an analysis of SLC, it would show that most of the actual money comes from the urban core. (Lots of expensive property doesn't always generate a lot of revenue due to things like homestead exemptions). Which represents a substantial shift - for a long time, land values (and land uses) have so low that controlling affluent areas seemed like a win. But as suburbia ages, and the infrastructure renewals costs roll in, I suspect that may less the case. I doubt 'South-of-Emigration-City' would be financially sustainable on its own - not enough commercial development, not enough density. Perhaps it could join up with the City of Millcreek? 

I suppose it you were an arch-capitalist, you'd cut Salt Lake City down to the revenue generating parts, and de-annex the rest, and create something like the City of London. Not very politically viable though - the Utah Legislature would just bully it like they did with the Inland Port Overlay District, but worse. So perhaps that explains why two very different polities exist in one city--mutual defense. 

[1] I often genuinely forget that Salt Lake City extends south of I-80. It's a part of the city I never think about and almost never visit. Likewise, the part of South Salt Lake that extends north of I-80 always seems faintly absurd. Partially it's because SLC was so rigorous in annexing everything north of the 201 to the west. 

"The categories and funding levels represent the goals and visions of the region"

Reading a prior LRTP and I feel strangely humbled. I don't think I've ever seen a clearer connection made between funding and goals. Too often, the connection between goals and funding is nebulous, and only linked by project prioritization schema. 

Too often, the financially constrained work program is just a laundry list of widening projects where the model forecast congestion, with intersection improvements where widening seems too expensive, with a dash of safety projects where public outcry has been loud enough, and whatever Bike/Ped projects dedicated activists can drive through.

By deciding in advance what mattered and how much, it financially constrained not just the whole plan, but specific types of projects within the plan. And only then was the ranking of specific projects considered. 

#--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Before ranking and selecting the submitted projects for the LRTP, the TAC set a guide for the funding level of the different types of transportation projects. Eleven different categories were reviewed for funding. The categories were: 

1. 1. Safety Intersection 
2. 2. Geometric Intersections 
3. 3. Corridor Safety Improvement 
4. 4. Road Widening < 5 Miles 
5. 5. Road Widening > 5 Miles 
6. 6. Bike/Ped Facilities 
7. 7. Transit 
8. 8. Resurfacing Primary 
9. 9. Resurfacing Secondary 
10. 10. Bridge 
11. 11. New Roadway 

The TAC approved distribution of the COG’s LRTP funding of approximately $125M between seven categories. The categories and funding levels represent the goals and visions of the region. Below are the total categories, the percent of the total funding and the approximate amount of funding available over the life of the LRTP (25 years.)

Planning Mantra

 "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson

As a planner, you don't need to invent anything. City-making is an old technology, and while incremental improvements are constantly ongoing, it's pretty stable. So if you've got a problem, there is a near certainty that someone else has had that same problem (potentially decades or even centuries ago) and has already solved it. 

John Forester is dead

John Forester, "the father of vehicular cycling" died in 2020. 

Right now, his legacy is 'controversial'. I suspect in a generation his perspective will be more analogous to the miasma theory of disease. Research is pretty clear that many fields fail to move forward while their founding 'big man' continues to live, publish, and advocate. 

I understand where Forester came from -- I was a 3% 'confident and assured' cyclist playing chicken with cars basically up until the moment I started cycling with my wife. But 'vehicular cycling' functionally limited cycling participants to a tiny portion of the population, which limited its political support, which limited infrastructure development, which leads to our present mess. 

"You aren't a real cyclist unless you can ride in traffic" is bunk and always has been. "You aren't a real X unless you can do Y" is exclusionary gatekeeping. Vehicular cycling as a motorism--the idea that other modes can reach parity with cars by pretending to be cars.

Maybe vehicular cycling made sense when Forester was a teen, when the default car was the Morris Minor and there was a nationwide 30 mph speed limit. But in America, the most popular cars is a Ford F-150 with much higher mass, much better acceleration, and traveling at much higher speeds. 

Use Surveys to Give Courage to Public Officials

One of the real virtues of a public survey is to provide courage for public officials as they make politically charged decisions.

Being a public official is tough--constantly asked to make important decisions on a multiplicity of topics on which lack technical expertise, and so you are really reliant on: A) what you staff says, and B) what your personal network says. So, it is easy to get a skewed view of what the public supports or will at least accept, and how widespread opposition actually is.

Something to remember next time you design a rider survey--be sure to include a question that addresses political questions like coverage vs. frequency.

Most people also firmly hold a wide variety of beliefs based on anecdotal evidence. Empirical data, empirical data, when presented with a compelling narrative and selected representative anecdotes, can do a lot to change minds.

Nothing Bore Fruit

Cincinnati's abandoned subway is a cautionary tale about the dangers of planning rapid transit based on corridor availability rather than demand. Admittedly, the Great Depression was an absolute reaper for in-process transit capital projects. But the fact that it was 'originally envisioned as a loop' is an immediate red flag on the 1925 planning. And.... some quality time with Google map suggested that 1925 loop was itself planned on the basis of corridor availability -- cobbling together a series of available existing railroad corridors (B&O, PRR) along with the canal path, with some handwaving on the connection through downtown.  So even if the subway segment was a good idea, the plan in which it was embedded was suspect. 

But that's not an issue specific to Cincinnati - planning from that era in general is suspect--nothing bore fruit--there were zero new rapid transit systems between 1908 and 1972 (although a few cities (Cleveland, PATCO) converted railroads or streetcars to rapid transit systems during that time).

Wiith regard to the project's continued abandonment. An amazing corridor exists, but thanks to Urban Renewal, the conditions that made it a good idea in 1925 no longer exist. 

Which is a problem. People suggest things like "Oh we have an abandoned rail line, you should add light rail" or "We had streetcar here in 1925, so you should put it here in 2025" as if land use isn't fundamental to transit feasibility. 

Relation between building typologies & density

 The world needs nice diagram out there illustrating the accessibility trade-off between space devoted to providing access (highways + parking) and the land being provided access. In the meantime, this graphic does a pretty good job:

Original image source seems to be:

Towards an Urban Renaissance - Wikipedia

Wayback Machine

What I know about AI:

As a serial-attempted-AI-early-adopter, I've been repeatedly burned, but that's not helpful for AI, where circumstances are changing fast enough to make previous experience irrelevant. Of course, after five years of hype, all AI is necessarily over-sold, so while it's almost necessary to be skeptical, that same skepticism can blind us to the very-new-and-novel things AI can do this month it that it couldn't last month. 

Don't trust it--it will confidently lie to you about anything.  It has no understanding, and no continuity - it will tell you one thing one day, and something else day. I would never trust AI for any technically factual information. It has a deep well of "Encyclopedia" knowledge (thanks Wikipedia) but anything that requires specialized expertise, it's knowledge base is that of a Reddit commentor. 

Don't trust AI to tell you facts. It does not care about truth or falsehood, only plausibility. AI has 'Encyclopedia Knowledge'. It only knows what it was trained on, and that knowledge only dates up to a certain point.  You can never trust the factuality of AI. Those little AI summaries Google and Bing pump out are just whatever the top ten websites say blended together. Which (thanks to SEO) is already AI slop itself. My experience working with AI summaries is that they weren't so much wrong as deeply basic, first-year undergrad basic. (AI is trained on the web, and web content is produced by average humans, after all). 

The metaphor I hear is for AI is a really good junior analyst - fast, tireless, but completely lacking in judgment, so you have to review  everything it does--you can't trust it. It's impressively good at summary... but then you never develop the latent memory that serves as guard-rails on doing absurd things.

 Judge AI by what it does best - write code. That's where it shines, because it's got a big codebase, and its a tightly bounded activity. It's gotten vastly better in the past year. A year ago, it would give me code that would take longer to debug than to write from scratch. For R code, my outputs improved radically when I started listing the packages/libraries I wanted Claude.AI--solved the maddening case where it would mix up functions with the same name. Second useful bit has been copy-pasting the error code in -- people have been doing that for years on stack.exchange.com and other forums, so the training set is robust and it helps rapidly identify the correct problem and solution. 

My friend is a programmer, and I asked if he was scared of AI and he laughed--he said most of his work is fixing and maintaining bugs in existing software, and AI is terrible at that, because it's all unique and novel. The programmers who are scared are the folks who make new code--who make apps. For those folks, vibe-coding is in real danger of putting them out of a job. But the largely unforeseen aspect will be that "software will eat everything" as it becomes feasible to automate anything vaguely algorithmic, where the cost of doing so was previously prohibitive. 

AI use in education is a cruel  joke; people pay money to go to college to learn, and learning consists of developing your own capabilities by doing arbitrarily hard things, which AI entirely short-circuits, and eventually we are going to wind up going back to oral exams, which both actually test what people have learned and develop relevant life-skills. Which has implications for our own use of AI - it's doing the work for us, but we are denying ourselves the learning. 

But AI is good at doing things fast, and I think we've reached the point where AI+iterative fixes will, for the same number of hours, generate a superior product. That we will be able to do things in less time is delusional--clients have a budget and if we offer a product for less, they will be suspicious that we've cut corners. Hence, what we'll see is a rise in standards. I recall the quality of pre-computer studies (done on typewrite!) versus word processors. So as hard things got easier to do, quality expectations rose. And I think we'll see the same thing with AI--we'll be expected to review thousands of pages of documents in a way that was never reasonable before. 

I think the best niche for AI may be proposals, where it's ability to Google things and make up something that sounds plausible and matches the format, in a way that is responsive to the RFP. However, I'm very curious about how AI can be used to pull things in from 'my' knowledge base (market quals, resumes, past project descriptions) and chunk that out as a proposal. Indeed, I'm hoping to learn today how to use AI on the CAMPO proposal text. And it would be amazing to be able to have a 'knowledge base' of files I can just check into AI.  My brother, who is deeply into AI, strongly suggests using multiple AIs--outputs of one as inputs of the other, iterate back and forth. 

"AI has given me specific things that I can then go and validate... it tells me what it sees and then I interrogate it further". "You have to know why you are asking the question"....When we bring in our professional expertise, to collaborate with AI,... can do more than if I just cut and paste..... iterative and Socratic process". - CD

Sounds like knowing how to 'interrogate' an AI to test and check what its pumped out, using professional judgment, is now the 2025 equivalent of knowing how effectively Google things. 

China, aviation and HSR

"China’s high-speed rail network keeps rewriting the rules of distance and connectivity. With over 50,000 kilometres of track in operation, linking 97% of cities above 500,000 residents at speeds of up to 350 km/h, it has become the largest and most intensely used system on the planet."  

- Chris Bruntlett

The metrics remind me of levels of US-aviation service coverage, and make me wonder if China hasn't focused on HSR for much the same reason it focused on electric cars: both commercial aviation and internal combustion vehicles are (like semi-conductor manufacturing) industries with extremely high-quality thresholds to be internationally competitive, and rather than fight it out, China pivoted toward New Technologies.

Proximity or space

"Cities cannot escape compounding distance costs through better planning or technology. Different urban forms simply create different patterns of who experiences these costs and when. Higher density concentrates opportunity close together, reducing distance costs for those who can afford proximity but often pricing out families seeking space. Lower density offers larger homes and lower housing costs, but imposes compounding daily travel costs on anyone without flexible schedules or the ability to work remotely. Both patterns are rational responses to the same constraint. Both create winners and losers"

Hamish Campbell "Why Distance Compounds Costs in Cities"; Cities + Transport 2026 February 2

This is the nut of the problem with American urbanism: we've still got a transportation policy designed to service families seeking space. They were good policies when they were enacted, when America was undergoing a baby boom and had decades of underbuilding. America was never a nation of single-family households with single earners, commuting by car, but we built a massive amount of housing for the kinds of people who were. But those are no longer the kinds of new households we are getting, and we need to make our transportation system reflect that. People like space, but they'd be willing to pay for proximity, but our legal and regulatory environment prohibits it, and our transportation investment paradigm not only fails to support it but is actively hostile to it. 

The point of transportation investments is to reduce transportation costs. So we need to seriously think about which transportation costs we are trying to reduce, and if those people are actually being served by those investments. And we may find that the people the subsidy is nominally expected to help aren't actually being helped. 

On the flip side, given what Hamish has articulated, it begs the question: "If it's ok to reduce daily travel costs, why is it not ok to lower housing costs?". Any economist will look at you in the eye and tell you that a subsidy is a subsidy, and when you want more of something, you subsidize it--basic economics. So theoretically, there is nothing to stop us from subsiding housing for families who want it. 

Be suspicious of Travel Demand Models

When it comes to transit forecasting, you should always be suspicious of anything coming out of a travel demand model. The Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZ) are often too large, and the travel times on the centroid connectors often reflect car access from parking lot, rather than walk-access from the curb, which, given the exponential decay in walking trips due to distances, leads them to over-estimate ridership for malls and strip-commercial.

Hamish Cambell Gets it

"This is why transit agencies obsess over frequency and easy connections. The difference between trains every 3 minutes versus every 9 minutes is not three times worse. It is exponentially worse. At 3-minute frequency, a missed connection costs 3 minutes. At 9-minute frequency, that missed connection compounds into schedule disruption, late arrivals, and cascading delays through your day. Add capacity problems where you might not fit on the next train, and the costs compound again. You are not just waiting 9 minutes. You are waiting 9 minutes, then maybe another 9, while also managing stress about being late and uncertainty about whether you will even make it on. Research consistently shows riders will choose a slower direct route over a faster route requiring transfers. They are not being irrational. They are avoiding compounding costs that planners can measure but riders simply experience as too much friction."

Hamish Campbell "Why Distance Compounds Costs in Cities"; Cities + Transport 2026 February 2

Key point is the anxiety acts as a travel time multiplier. "If I miss this one, how long do I have to wait for the next one?" Riding the bus already includes anxiety of boarding. Add a transfer doubles that. Reliability overcomes the anxiety. If you can't afford frequency, then you've got to manage reliability. Clockface scheduling is great, but--if you promise a bus every 15 minutes, but can't deliver, that's worse than not promising anything. 

Bus reliability and Planning TIme

If you ask people what they want from public transport, they usually say "Speed." But if you look at behavioral data, speed isn't the most important factor. Reliability is. I would rather take a bus that takes 40 minutes guaranteed, than a car that takes 20 minutes but might take 60 if there is traffic. Uncertainty is stressful. Knowing "I will arrive at 8:55 AM" is worth more than "I might arrive at 8:30 AM". This is why dedicated lanes (BRT/Tram) are so powerful. They might not be fast, but they are predictable. We don't need to break the sound barrier. We just need to keep a promise. Do you prefer a fast gamble or a slow guarantee? - Juan Mora Triana

When my bus was scheduled to arrive at 7:55, I had to catch the bus scheduled to arrive at 7:40, because the second bus was late in picking me up. I worked in an office, being 5m late wasn't critical--but it earned me an unfriendly glance from my boss. And so, I started taking the earlier bus. And so, what was nominally a 23m trip (7m walk, 13m bus ride, 3m walk) started to eat 40 minutes out of my day. 

Making it worse was the irregularity in what was nominally a 15m bus. The 7:40 bus would be on-time, or early. The 7:55 bus would be 7-10 minutes late, reliably. So reliably that I began to time my walk from my house to the bus stop to start when the 7:55 bus was supposed to arrive, knowing that the bus wouldn't have arrived before I reached the bus stop. But that was for a bus I took five days a week. 

When I was trying to take a new bus to someplace new, I'd stroll up to the stop, pull its schedule out of my pack of pamphlets, use the system map to check which routes it serviced, pull out the appropriate schedule for the route, and check my watch. Then I'd take half the headway and estimate the blocks, figuring I could make 8 SLC blocks (~1 mile) in 20m, and that the bus moved about 3x that fast. For a 15m bus, I'd estimate a 10m wait (half the headway plus some uncertainty). For a 30m bus, I'd estimate I'd be waiting 20 minutes--the actual wait time plus what I could have walked waiting for the bus. For the hourly bus--I'd start walking. The combination of wait time plus uncertainty plus lost walking time made it a bad bet--my standard estimate was that I was better off walking two miles than waiting for an hourly bus. 

Even today, any trip under 10m, I walk. It's less stressful, because it's less uncertain. Even with a bus with a 15m headway, odds are I'll make it a half mile before the bus comes. I've repeatedly had the frustrating experience of seeing the bus I would have liked to take pass me by... but not often. 

Rapid transit, it's the same calculation, except that I remove the mental 'penalty' for potential to be late. The station will be nicer, there will be places to sit, there is an arrival time count-down [2] and I know the vehicle will be on time. Riding TRAX in SLC, if the train was 15m late, I'd tell me wife "Someone is probably dead" [1]. 

This also tied into my willingness to make transfers. My rules of thumb were that it was always worth it to transfer between a 15m bus and rapid transit, sometimes worthwhile to transfer between two 15m buses, and worthwhile to take a 30m bus TO rapid transit (but not the reverse). Anything else, I was better off walking. So I did a lot of things like taking TRAX west then south and then walking east from a Trax station, because it was a better bet than just waiting for a 30m bus to take me directly south. The bus would either be delayed in arriving or delayed enroute, where TRAX was practically a guarantee.

Admittedly, I was young and fit, with plenty of time to kill, and Salt Lake is a very safe city. But I also didn't have any other options: No car and lack of plowed sidewalks/lanes made biking in winter in SLC prohibitive. 

[1] After enough highly reported crashes at railroad gates, people quit racing the train, but someone racing the train at a red light stills seems like an annual event. SUV drivers are used to being the biggest thing on the road, but in a car-eat-car world, a train is an apex predator.

[2] Transit Information systems that only provide scheduled GTFS arrival times, rather than real-time GTFS data about vehicle location are a cruel joke, so knowable false that they can only be considered a deliberate deception.

The slippery slope of federal funding

There is a motorism-based ideology in transportation planning that says that the public sector should never pay for internal circulation. Like most of the tenants of motorism, it's based on early interstate highway development, and the ideology of what the Feds were and were not going to pay for. 

The Federal government was going to pay for the limited access highways, and the state governments were going to pay for anything local. But, given the generosity of Federal funding for interstate construction, the definition of 'local' shortly ceased to include on-ramps and off-ramps, or viaducts onto the freeway, or access ramps to the viaducts, or anything that could be reasonable be justified as being part of an Interstate so the feds paid for its construction/paving.

But interstates come with interstate design standards, which include high speeds, which require large curve radii, which conflicts badly with urban street grids, necessitating a lot of demolition. And once you've got someone willing to pay for demolition, it's very tempting to direct that energy to someplace you've been wanting to do slum clearance anyway. 

Kansas City Streetcar, fixed guideway transit, and marginal pricing.

Wikipedia tells me that the OKC streetcar, post-pandemic, was costing $420k a year, collecting $60k a year in fares, for a net loss of $360k a year. With perhaps 15k riders, that's about $23 dollar per rider, which is absurd. So, I hope the areas it is serving are experiencing a whole lot of additional economic activity and new development, because that's a lot. 

More absurd is that a few years earlier, it was free to ride but had 75,000 riders. So the math says $420k a year, collecting $0k a year in fares, for a net loss of $420k a year, for a cost of about $6 per rider. So running things fare-free, they were getting 4x the benefit! 

The case for 'free buses' is often questionable--is the reduced travel time reduced stop times worth the reduced fare? But for fixed guideway transit, the calculation is different, because a fixed guideway transit system already represents millions in fixed costs investment. The OKC streetcar was built on the cheap, for $23m. So assuming a (SWAG) of 4.35%, they are already paying a million dollars a year of interest on the debt to build the thing. So its not $420k to operate, it's 1,420k to operate. Which, at 15k riders, is ~$94 a rider. BUT! At 75k riders, that's ~$19/rider. 

Once you've built a thing, your best option is to maximize the service you are providing. And the way to do that is to make the marginal cost of people using the service as close to zero as possible. And the way to do that is a pass system. My yoga studio runs $150 a month or $30 a class. And when I'm on a per-class basis, it makes me reluctant to take a class. But while I'm on the monthly pass, I've got every incentive to maximize my use. And that's exactly the logic every fixed guideway transit system should be exploiting, because their marginal cost of additional trip is very small, and their fixed costs very large. 

Of course, during the commute peak, transit capacity actually matters and its standing room only. But that's a fraction of the day, and the rest of the day should have discount pricing. Restaurants don't have 'happy hours' because they want you to be happy--but to draw people in during a slack time where they have to 'staff up' prior to the peak, and so they suffer the costs regardless.