Alex Hallowell

We’ve got a plan for that! 🚍❤️

YouTube video by TransLink The Empty Bus Lane Myth

TransLink in Vancouver have such a great comms team working with their bus priority program. I love thid busting the myth of the empty bus lane 🚍 www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9gj...

This is so gutting, we need so much more transit, orders of magnitude more if we have any hope of mitigating the worst of climate change.

Knowing local match ratios for grant opportunities, eligible fund sources, regulatory requirements, contract bid and award structures all make or break projects.

And nobody ever trains you in any of it. It’s nearly all luck or osmosis that folks learn the ins and outs, and as I found when switching coasts, it’s not always transferable from one place to the next.

Something very interesting about working on the public side of transit projects is how absolutely essential an understanding of public finance and procurement are for getting anything at all accomplished.

BECAUSE YOU CANT MAKE $$ OFF MICRO TRANSIT.

Even without doing ANY of their own market research (they just stripped public data) they went under within 18 mos. You know why?

Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities designed for commuters | TechCrunch Ride-hail and delivery giant Uber is introducing cheap, fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities -- one

When I was still at Muni about 10 years ago, we got a FOIA from a startup with a similar business model. They wanted our stop-based ridership info and stood up routes along our highest demand corridors.

Sometimes we do know what we’re talking about.

I am *SO* lucky to have a boss whose answer to this was, “tell me how we can support you whenever you know what you need.”

I’m now caring for my 22 month old on a workday while trying to cobble together full time coverage for our two children.

Our beloved nanny has a family emergency and is no longer available to work with us. We had 36 hours notice of this.

This is hardly an original observation but childcare in the US is the fucking worst.

The central subway in SF

This is not unique to Valencia. Madrids system is generally 🤌 but the fare payment system is very old and janky and eats €€€

I know I’m hardly the first to point out the incoherence of this admin but it’s hard to understand how entire programs won’t be wiped out through this benign-sounding “review process”

The way many grants are determined is by using BCAs that *must* quantify benefits to EJ communities and demonstrate significant GHG reductions.

So the thing about this mandatory US DOT review of unobligated grants is that they are flagging things like equity and GHG reductions as incompatible with Trump admin goals. Those were mandatory elements of many grant applications. You wouldn’t have won without explicit mention of those benefits.

Genuinely curious if they’re exempt from MEPA for some reason? The process required to remove mature trees is not for the faint of heart.

Which was a problem for a system that was configured to generate only B+W images.

One agency found that there was a bizarre 30+ year old “business practice” at their RMV that they would not issue tickets if the pictures weren’t in color.

I have had the pleasure to talk to most major transit agencies/cities with an automated enforcement program and let me tell you, the pretzels they have to tie themselves in to get to an enforceable infraction. Yowza.

If there is a public policy or a city planning grad student out there looking for a juicy PhD topic, I’ve found it for you: regulations vs. business rules for automated camera enforcement.

💔

Cars are the number two cause of child fatalities, behind only firearms. Doing anything that reinforces car centric designs, particularly under the guise of supporting families is disregarding reality.

Trump Administration Prioritizes High-Birthrate Areas for Transportation Funds Some policy experts said they were not sure how the move was connected to the president’s overall transportation goals.

It’s no surprise to see bizarre guidance coming out of Washington but I take particular issue with this NYTimes article where they uncritically present a bunch of nonsense about suburban car-centric policies as “family friendly”: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/u...

I can’t speak for every institution, but I know the only thing I did during the months of November and December was to game out what might happen if the worst was unleashed after Inauguration.

Welp the American public is about to learn just how much the Federal government spends on things they’ve never had to think about before.

It’s leveling the playing field, shifting a focus away from cars and towards the modes we want to see. It’s been amazing as a resident to see these changes rolled out nearly constantly. It’s changed the way my family and I get around.