Research Fellow @joinFAI; opinions mine not theirs | Working to make US transportation faster, cheaper, more reliable, & less safe | prev: Econ & CS @UChicago
Inside the Beltway, USA
Based in United States
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Social liberalism (which tbh I actually think this quiz understated, it wasn't asking the right questions to show it) hides unusually strong fiscal and especially regulatory conservatism
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Not for more money, therefore for less service
Emily Loper of @BayAreaCouncil claims transit agencies “can’t cut their way out” of their fiscal crisis and that Measure RTM’s financial-efficiency review “goes above and beyond” traditional accountability.
Yes, they can—and No, it doesn’t.
BART carries half its 2019 weekday ridership, yet operating costs have risen faster than inflation since 2019. Agencies can right-size service, reduce bloated management, renegotiate labor contracts, reform inefficient work rules. These are all things not tried before, and RTM requires none of it.
They can temporarily redirect Cap-and-Invest and other funding to operations while working on a better plan in 2028.
RTM's efficiency review sets no savings target, no cost-per-rider standard and no ridership goals. Operators help develop the cost-saving options, choose which ones to implement and help oversee the process. The review lacks independence, therefore is meaningless.
Transit needs restructuring and sustainable funding—not $17 billion more to preserve the operating model that created today’s deficits.
Measure RTM refinances the problem; it does not fix it.
Vote NO on RTM. Fixes before funding.
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simultaneous MARC arrivals into Union Station
not how I personally would have scheduled it, but bonus points for style
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This is apparently the website of an autonomous vehicle operator in Louisiana.
What in the 2005?
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One problem with Bentham’s take here is that he relies on intuition where you really ought to do a numerical check. Even if you only think neuron count matters linearly (obviously wrong) that still puts 75 insect-hours to one human second approximately in the same ballpark
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This morning I racked up probably like $100 in petty fees and was the victim of $0 in criminal damages. So that’s my personal stake in the issue.
Plus, I’d like to in the future have my kids be able to walk to the park without CPS detecting it on a camera and abducting them.
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Vermont's AV testing regime is crazy. I guess nobody is talking about this because it's Vermont, but an implemented law is very easy to copy and more people should probably be talking about it
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Yes. "Faster transit commutes" is just really hard. The median American commute is 26 minutes, if you presume a 5 minute walk to and from transit plus 5 minutes of waiting you're 60% of the way there already. The biggest advantage of transit is that riding it doesn't require your attention and so the per-minute perceived pain is lower.
Nonetheless, there seems to be something intuitive about a 30 minute commute. Places with high transit commute shares tend to have factors (ultra-frequent trains, apartments literally on top of or across the street from transit stations, offices connected internally to stations) which allow you to nearly zero out at least one of those items so you can get closer to 20 minutes of vehicle transit time. This also explains early super-interlining and structures like Old Dudley Square station, which were designed with fanatical adherence to the goal of minimizing transfer times
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locked account's comment but this is why the height limit is so damaging. By capping heights, the district limits the quantities of people who live a 1-, 3-, and 5-minute walk away from a Metro station. But those are the people who use Metro the most.
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Quick! Can anyone come up with examples of cases where the norms in an internet community spiralled away from conventional irl norms that's more professional than this image:
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Didn’t catch this in my earlier comment but having a B Train and an Exit B is exceptionally bad wayfinding. Wow. That’s awful
You may notice new signs on the lower level of L’Enfant Plaza station this week. This is part of our rollout of new, more unified, and user-friendly signage across the system. 🚇
Learn more about the project here: wmata.com/initiatives/plans-…
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It’s kind of appalling how little space is being used here. There are many ways to make your signs more or less readable but the easiest and most effective way is to make text bigger and use all available space
You may notice new signs on the lower level of L’Enfant Plaza station this week. This is part of our rollout of new, more unified, and user-friendly signage across the system. 🚇
Learn more about the project here: wmata.com/initiatives/plans-…
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waow, a drone responds faster than a cop? I had no idea
A cop takes about six minutes to reach a shoplifting call. The drone takes 97 seconds. That four minute gap was the entire business model of grab-and-run theft, and it just closed.
In Chula Vista, the department that invented drone-first response, the aircraft launches while the 911 call is still in progress, ignores every red light, and beats patrol to the scene almost every time. Then it just follows you. A dispatcher reads your position to ground units while you wander a parking lot thinking you got away. The two suspects in this clip aren't even running hard. Why would they? For their entire careers, walking fast was enough.
The wild part is how quickly this scaled. For years the FAA choked these programs with paperwork. Then between April 2025 and February 2026 it cleared over 1,000 police agencies to fly drones beyond visual line of sight. The previous seven years combined produced 976. Motorola just led a $125M round into BRINC with the stated goal of putting a 911 drone on every one of America's roughly 80,000 police and fire station roofs.
Chula Vista's data shows where this ends up. 25,000 missions. A role in 4,138 arrests. And on 4,629 calls, no officer showed up at all, because the drone alone settled it.
Petty theft survived for decades on a head start. The head start is gone.
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the median person should be able to easily afford the median rent
All new poverty line calculations we have are pretty dumb
The federal poverty line is like “will you die” ($15k) but every adjustment I see is like “wow, 20% of the population is in the bottom 20% of income” or “wow, the median person can barely afford the median rent”
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weighting the regression by flight count rather than airports changes the result basically not at all which surprises me at least a little
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My agent benchmarking has actually led me in the direction of an interesting result:
at most US airports, departures are more on time than arrivals. which is weird, it suggests that planes get delayed in flight which is the opposite of my anecdotal experience.
But there’s a split: for the largest airline at a given airport, flights leave later and arrive more on time. For locally non-dominant airlines, planes arrive late but gain time on the ground and leave more on-time.
I have literally no idea why this might be the case.
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the small regionals business got sold to Mitsubishi and the q400 to private equity after the cseries fiasco
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interestingly, Newark arrivals were more on-time than departures during the period of most intense meltdown, but the airport is returning to its roots as a place where flights make up time during turnaround
benchmark from a system I'm testing
If anyone else has fun graphs you want me to make please comment them, I don't really have that many ideas for data presentation tasks and I'm probably going to go through a lot of them
Also, behold the joint Buttigieg-Duffy collapse
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benchmark from a system I'm testing
If anyone else has fun graphs you want me to make please comment them, I don't really have that many ideas for data presentation tasks and I'm probably going to go through a lot of them
Also, behold the joint Buttigieg-Duffy collapse
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