JC Policy Circle

The Fire Department vs. Traffic Safety Advocates Street safety advocates are butting heads with fire officials. Swift fire response does not have to come at the cost of lives on the roadway. They can work together.

Really nice piece from @idothethinking.bsky.social on the dangers of the dangers of optimizing for narrow goals. open.substack.com/pub/darrello...

“Latent demand” is usually what we really mean when we say “induced demand”.

Let’s please retire the phrase “induced demand.” Too many people think it means that demand is produced out of thin air. If 6 people want pizza, but there are only 5 slices, making 1 more slice for the last person doesn’t make new demand—it just addresses demand that was always there but unmet.

New Yorkers to Vote on Affordable Housing Fast Track and Election Calendar This Fall The Charter Revision Commission convened by the mayor approved four ballot measures aimed at fighting the housing crisis — and one proposal to shift elections to even-numbered years.

The Charter Revision Commission voted to place five proposals on the November ballot — four aimed at simplifying and speeding up the development approval process for affordable housing.

YESSSSSS!!! I want to live in a world where mayors jockey to take credit for secure bike parking!

It's time for clear eyed thinking about the potential for the large-scale destruction of public transit in American cities. It could happen in the next two years. Thread... 1/

The Charter Revision Commission just approved the 5 questions that will be on ballots for NYC voters this November!

This includes 4 housing questions, which would collectively represent a huge step forward for affordability in New York. 🧵

NJ Transit approves $3.2B budget, engineer contract • New Jersey Monitor The new budget is the agency's first since the pandemic that does not include hundreds of millions of dollars in federal relief funds.

NJ Transit approves $3.2B budget, engineer contract newjerseymonitor.com/2025/07/18/n...

Long experience has shown me that in local government, the definition of "the community" is "people who own single-family houses."

If anyone wants to work with us to canvass at bus stops on Ocean and MLK so that those bus riders' voices can be heard on this, let us know! It'll drastically speed up their buses, but I'm worried many of them won't even know about this survey or meeting!

End aldermanic privilege!

@njtrainsit.bsky.social: what’s Hoboken’s secret? How do you churn out these technical electeds?

In JC, a number of council people are happy to defer to the administration on technical matters and so don’t prioritize understanding the nuts and bolts of the city’s government.

A shame, especially given the fact that JC is 5x bigger than Hoboken!

It’s remarkable how much more the Hoboken council emphasizes technical proficiency than does Jersey City’s. A Hoboken councilwoman, Tiffanie Fisher, put out a detailed and thoughtful breakdown of her views on the proposed budget. In JC, most council people don’t even attend most budget meetings.

TIL! Thanks for the fascinating information.

Youth curfew in Newark? Is this real? It must kill summer house parties!

From the jerseycity community on Reddit: Waymo on the road in Downtown Explore this post and more from the jerseycity community

www.reddit.com/r/jerseycity...

Per r/JerseyCity, it looks like Waymo’s training fleet has arrived in Jersey City.

And in Manhattan, Uber has started offering fixed route service. Large L4 AVs operating on fixed routes = abundant, cheap buses.

Are we *sure* public transit as currently operated/funded has a future in NJ?

Taxes that pay for themselves aren’t really expenses. They’re investment.

Can we please stop measuring the size of govt by the amount of taxes? It’s wildly misleading.

Like, if we didn’t have social security, most people would invest a lot more of their savings in … treasuries. The same thing the social security program does with your taxes.

State & local govts (& unpaid civic groups) do a ton of heavy lifting on disaster planning & recovery, but they will always need backup (staff, $$, info, technical expertise) from the federal govt. by all means, let’s build more state & local capacity but not as a *substitute* for federal support.

But people on here will insist that you can just afford everything bro.

We can all easily understand that tradeoffs are inevitable when it comes to setting our own private budgets, but some people really struggle to understand that the same idea applies to govt. Sane adults know not to buy a cruise ticket before being sure they can afford rent.

Very sorry to hear it. For what very little it’s worth, the research fund cuts were some of the most braindead parts of the entire federal program.

Excellent question. His plan doesn’t clearly disclose the answer. Perhaps he’d shrink state aid to schools based on this quote to NJ.com?

It’d be better if these affordability proposals focused on identifying and slimming down underperforming (ie low demand) programs and increasing spending efficiency for high performance programs instead of just bluntly cutting budgets.

In NJ, nearly all income taxes go to the schools. Are we sure that across-the-board income tax cuts aren’t economic self-sabotage?

In other words, gross taxes collected can rise while the cost of govt decreases or stays static. For example we know that in many cases, $1 of spending on schools results in a > $1 increase in property values. The taxes for spending on teachers isn’t a real cost of govt!

People (here, Jack C) complain NJ isn’t affordable because of its high taxes, but we’re skeptical that that’s right, at least in the sense they mean it.

The economic cost of govt = (goods/services taxes fund) - (goods/services ppl want). The key thing to optimize is to shrink this difference.