Safe Systems Civil Engineer

People Get in Way More Fatal Car Crashes on Days Hot New Music Drops It seems that when a major music artist releases a new album of certified bangers, one of those bangers is your car banging into a tree.

The rise in fatalities was more pronounced in cars equipped with Apple CarPlay.
www.vice.com/en/article/p...

It’s nothing to him really … one of many around the world

Dutch bike networks evolved. Designers watched behavior and chosen routes, and then formalized them.

Definitely true for people on foot too!

Legal scarcity is not an accident. It’s a policy choice.The equity windfall for incumbents is financed by higher rents and higher purchase prices for young families.
Some states leaders are starting to change the rules.
They must stop enforcing the scarcity premium instead of the American Dream.

Housing should never be a discretionary gift. It should be a fundamental right.
#BackTo3
@mayor.nyc.gov
@kimdriscollma.bsky.social
@samseder.bsky.social
@davidsirota.com

Even under Reagan and Clinton, leaders who claimed to favor markets , we didn’t legalize market housing growth, instead choosing to subsidize scarcity.

Why? Rising home values made scarcity politically popular. Incumbent property owners benefited and talked only of character and traffic.

We moved from building public housing to funding ongoing rent subsidies and developer tax credits.

Spending rose. Supply didn’t match.

That’s not a free market, it’s permanent subsidy layered on top of constrained zoning to protect distorted equity growth.

Since the 1970s, federal low-income housing subsidies (rental aid + LIHTC) have risen over 4× per capita in real terms. We didn’t deregulate. We subsidized around scarcity instead of legalizing enough homes to keep them affordable.

Allow the housing market to work.
substack.com/@danmurphy67...

Only 5 to 10 % of all single-family homeowners in the US have the right to add an apartment to their home. Why isn’t it higher in blue progressive states that claim to care about the working class?

YouTube video by CNN Elizabeth Warren tells Democrats to use new playbook

Right on. How are you going to lower my housing costs…?? Talk about nothing else.
youtube.com/shorts/g3uQs...

What prevents any state from making the duplex the by right base unit, giving any single family owner the right to add an apartment ?

Affordability. Allow much more housing by right across the metro and province. Highest housing multipliers in N America!

What about behind you ?
Safe connected AAA ! 💯

Only true in short term at local level and depends on the amount of local upzoning allowed. If the state were to upzone metro wide supply would grow sufficiently to lower the value of land. It worked in 1970 and can again. It will take time but should be the North Star for the grandkids
#BackTo3

"Single family zoning is a subsidy to homeowners. It's a subsidy that's paid by renters by making housing in the area less affordable. And given that the average homeowner has 40 times the net worth of the average renter, it means that this is a subsidy to the rich from the poor."

Arterials are not overloaded because engineers failed.

They’re overloaded because:
The metro system forces cross-municipal travel
Local zoning suppresses proximity.
State funding reinforces hierarchy

Engineers are managing symptoms of a land-use geometry problem.

Should state safety funding be conditional on zoning reform?

Should planning approvals require quantified exposure modeling?

Should severe injury risk per capita be tied to housing allocation?

Safe Systems manage kinetic energy and exposure.
Zoning determines exposure before a single stripe is painted.

Land use and network design set exposure, the prevailing speed environment, trip length, and congestion/queue conditions that drive risky behaviors often before an engineer is asked to provide comment. A key part of #safesystems

Are high multipliers legal modern redlining?

Bad Data Alert: Council Tears Apart DOT Daylighting Study - Streetsblog New York City The internal review, obtained by Streetsblog, dismantles DOT's fear-mongering.

Universal daylighting debate
nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/11/10/b...

How Zoning Won In 1926, the Supreme Court’s Euclid decision enshrined zoning in US cities. On its 100th anniversary, academics gathered to reflect on the landmark ruling’s mixed legacy.

The 20th century’s Original Sin

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Densify sprawl. ADUs by right. Allow mixed commercial. SFH conversions by right … it adds up to better density and more demand for transit and AAA bike

It’s affordable for incumbents but for the bottom 1/2 we need:

#BackTo3 = Homes cost ~3× local median income (again like in 1970)

#BackTo3 = Homes cost ~3× local median income (again like in 1970)

The Middle-Class New Deal by A. Mechele Dickerson - Paper Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

This is the path #BackTo3 that will unlock true middle class growth again
www.ucpress.edu/books/the-mi...

New NBER paper finds that US crash deaths rise by ~15% on dates of major album releases.

Distraction from smartphones is a likely culprit.

www.nber.org/papers/w34866