rohan aras

The shift is a pretty common joke among Arab American comedians fwiw. And I think people still see Shakira as white (though maybe Hispanic white)

This bill just passed Oregon’s House & heads to the governor’s desk. Congrats to @senkhanhpham.bsky.social & team for shepherding a bipartisan housing reform that many people said could never happen. 🤩🏢

YouTube video by San José Fire Department Ingress of Firefighters conducting fire operations during the egress of building occupants

San Jose FD, for the CAL FIRE single-stair report, did a simulation of evacuation from a building, both in a stairway segregated from firefighters going up and then shared. It was an interesting Rohrschach test for the group – the FDs thought it looked really bad, the others thought it was fine.

James Talarico, who just received the Democratic nomination for US Senate from Texas, was the lead sponsor of last session's successful single stair bill in the Texas House.

We argued a bunch over this in the work group. I said we need to compare small single-stair buildings to large two-stair buildings, since those are the worst-case scenarios under current/proposed codes. FD objection was that I was putting my thumb on the scales, and that’s apples to oranges.

The house bill included, among other things, Identifying Regulatory Barriers (an updated YIMBY act) and a section that would create a model point-access building code.

Both of those didn't make the Senate cut unfortunately—it'll be interesting to see if anything gets brought back in conferencing

Our explainer for the original senate bill has a large overlap with this one too.

The major difference to note is that both Build More Housing Near Transit and Housing Supply Frameworks were removed from this new version

The major difference is that they dropped the Build More Housing Near Transit act, likely because of jurisdiction issues in the house and because it has a path through Surface Transportation Reauth instead

The ROAD to housing: Tim Scott's housing bill marks a bipartisan breakthrough - Niskanen Center The bill seeks to confront the nation’s affordable housing crisis by reforming decades of ineffective federal housing policies.

Most of our explainer for the original senate bill still applies:

www.niskanencenter.org/bipartisan-r...

The Senate has just gotten 84 votes for cloture on the federal bipartisan housing package!

ROAD has all-but-passed once more, this time with key House additions from the House package

It's not over yet, but it's real bipartisan momentum (+ White House support 👀)

I think one of the fundamental things I’ve learned about politics from my work in Spokane can be summed up by something @mnolangray.bsky.social shared recently:

Winners seek to broaden the tent and look for converts. Losers seek to narrow the tent and look for heretics.

Townhouses are IRC…but not after you stick retail at the bottom.

It's interesting that cities develop a preference for specific tools when implementing circulation strategies for pre-car neighborhoods.

Stockholm seems to prefer modal filters and short bus-only streets to contraflow bus lanes and circuitous one-way networks

Södermalm ⤵️

WA's scissor stair bill just passed senate. now on to ferguson's desk

congrats @davina425.bsky.social @sightline.org

The Births Of the Cool (Published 2002)

From www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/n...

''When we talk about where the cafe is going,'' he said, ''I'm talking about a kids' menu, and they're talking about D.J.'s and sangria.'' Part of that is attributable to a generation gap: he is 39, and many of his employees are still in their teens. But Mr. Siegler also sees baby stores and children's menus as part of a natural evolution, much like the changes that transformed SoHo and Greenwich Village. ''Every few months there's this fear that it will no longer be everyone's little stretch of bohemian paradise,'' he said, referring to a recent series of Starbucks scares. ''Ultimately, that's going to happen, and ultimately the people who gentrify the neighborhood are the ones who complain loudest about the degree to which it gets gentrified.''

Could also be the opposite—this article from 2002 seems awful prescient:

A chart showing traffic tickets issued in San Francisco, with a sharp drop that began in 2014, hit bottom in 2022 when just a few tickets were issued, and has now rebounded almost to 2014 levels.

We’re back, baby!

Locations of new homes built in Switzerland in 2018

Country-wide effects of new housing supply: Evidence from moving chains, by Lukas Hauck and Frederic Kluser

Another new paper on housebuilding and vacancy chains, this time with data on every Swiss resident & housing unit! An interesting context given Switzerland's high immigration, very large rented sector and strong tenancy rent controls... frederickluser.github.io/files/Moving...

Huh. I've never heard of a Zotero translator before, but this sounds potentially useful given I both have reason to cite other people's and my own @ggwash.org posts.

Not to mention playing advantage on an offside call?

I couldn’t agree more! Our housing crisis pushes people farther away from jobs, schools, and more. When we build or expand public transit, we should build housing around it and vice versa. My Build More Housing Near Transit Act would get it done.
thehill.com/opinion/cong...

I am absolutely blown away at how strong this bill is. Sixplexes on suburban lots with no parking requirements!

When y’all run out of rice cooker discourse how about you consider how many different kinds of chili peppers (dried whole or powdered) a household should reasonably keep in stock, that should keep you busy for a while.

In @thehill.com with @rohanaras.bsky.social today where we argue that surface transportation policy is not complete without considering housing. thehill.com/opinion/cong...

New piece in The Hill—Congress should consider housing jointly with transportation in Surface Reauth:
- Reward places that accept growth with needed transpo investment
- Prioritize projects that improve access to daily needs
- Improve project delivery

thehill.com/opinion/cong...

A Tunnel to Transform Los Angeles The ambitious Sepulveda Transit Corridor project — an automated subway line underneath Bel Air — aims to do something rare in LA: Get people out of their cars.

Wow, I'm impressed. Bloomberg has the best article on the Sepulveda Line I've seen. No errors, very detailed, pushed back on nimby talking points, centered voices like Matute, Schneider, and Raman, and even mentions an EIFD! Full marks.

Very excited to say that the stars have aligned and NYU Marron/Transit Costs Project have landed a grant that will fund a second edition of Momentum, which will apply the high-throughput framework to major regional rail networks beyond the NY area.

Our three big new cases:
- NJT
- SEPTA
- METRA

Screenshot from study Dog owners could be encouraged, through educational outreach and on-site signage, to direct their dogs toward structures or areas where drains can capture infiltrating urine and stormwater. Such a system would protect ground and surface waters by diverting this nutrient rich flow to sanitary sewers or other treatment systems prior to release. Furthermore, greenspaces can be designed with the likely locations of hotspots already in mind, and so controls can be included in the site plan, rather than retrofitted Compared to natural areas, cities are enriched with N, and while environmental quality regulations have led to a decrease in atmospheric N deposition in recent decades (Eshleman et al., 2013), dog ownership rates are increasing. Even now, some countries are seeing a spike in pet adoptions and fostering in response to the COVID-19 crisis, with many pet shelters in the United States being completely emptied during the summer of 2020 (Oppenheim, 2020; Vincent et al., 2020). This spike notwithstanding, if current growth trends in urbanization and dog ownership continue, the localized impacts that we have found will likely increase in severity and possibly in spatial extent, and dog-deposition could become the single largest source of N in urban watersheds. As cities sprawl and/or density, urban greenspaces are coming under mounting pressure, even while the services they provide are becoming more important to greater numbers of people and their pets (Haaland and van den Bosch, 2015). Dogs have played an important part in human societies for thousands of years and will undoubtedly continue to be valuable partners. However, as our populations continue to grow, so does the need to better understand the role of dogs in urban N deposition and their broader impacts on sustainable urban development

This is as close as you can get to “Dog toilets recommend by scientists”👍

The extent that public spaces are essentially giant dog latrines is really unfortunate.

Abstract for Transportation for the Abundant Society: A growing chorus known as the abundance movement seeks to overcome artificial scarcity in the built environment—especially housing. Yet this movement’s signature goal of increasing housing production collides with a central driver of scarcity: development restrictions rooted in traffic concerns. Advocates often assume that building more housing will generate support for needed transportation reform. Experience suggests otherwise. In auto-dependent regions, adding housing without reconfiguring transportation tends to reinforce the logic of restriction. Unlocking abundance’s promised feedback loops requires re-grounding transportation policy in its relationship to land use. This Article makes two contributions. First, it introduces into legal analysis a core urban-planning framework: transportation accessibility, which evaluates system performance by users’ ability to reach destinations. Though facially modest, anchoring policy in accessibility would depart sharply from a century of practice, with significant implications across state and local government law. Second, drawing on 13 original interviews with current and former transportation officials, the Article develops a novel account of institutional barriers to reform. Far from the marble corridors and mahogany courtrooms where law is articulated, transportation policy is functionally made in the unglamorous offices of state and local government. We call this institutional crucible—shaped by agency culture and industry convention as well as hard law—“transportation policy linoleum.” It helps explain why proven, seemingly unobjectionable reforms routinely wither. The Article closes with a policy playbook designed to help accessibility break through the linoleum and deliver abundance.

Table of Contents CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 3 I. ABUNDANCE AND TRANSPORTATION POLICY 6 A. The Rise of Abundance 7 B. Transportation as a Binding Constraint 10 II. THE PURPOSE OF TRANSPORTATION POLICY 17 A. What Counts as Success? 18 B. From Mobility to Access 20 C. Transportation Policy Spillovers 24 1. Housing affordability 24 2. Climate mitigation 28 3. Roadway safety 29 III. OPERATIONAL BARRIERS TO REFORM 32 A. Network Effects and System Interdependence 33 B. Operational Complexity and Risk 34 IV. LEGAL BARRIERS TO REFORM 36 A. NEPA and the Dawn of Conservation Primacy 36 B. Judges as Planners: California’s CEQA Regime 40 C. Judges as Planners Around the Country 44 1. Minnesota and comprehensive planning 44 2. Washington, D.C. and density review 46 3. Montana and constitutional penumbra 46 V. TRANSPORTATION POLICY LINOLEUM 48 A. Policy “In Books” and “In Action”: 13 Interviews 48 B. Fragmentation and Coordination Failures 49 C. Path Dependence and Institutional Lock-In 53 D. Legal Risk and Defensive Administration 55 VI. A POLICY PLAYBOOK FOR ACCESS 57 A. Behavioral Data as Participation 57 1. Ex ante participation 58 2. Ex post participation 59 B. Realistic Alternatives Modeling 59 C. A More Honest Cost-Benefit Analysis 60 1. Requiring cost-benefit discipline 61 2. Accounting for opportunity costs and externalities 63 CONCLUSION 64

ToC continued, plus first bit of text from article: A central claim of the emerging “abundance agenda” is that in the physical world, more is more: more housing, more clean energy, and more infrastructure to support both. Abundance brings the American promise of plenty into policy, arguing that government should expand capacity—so that individuals can access the good life and society can advance climate goals, scientific discovery, and prosperity. In both its academic and popular expressions, the ideologically diverse movement contends that law has created artificial scarcity and that the remedy is to loosen outdated constraints and rebuild state capacity so government can build and approve major projects—housing, transportation, energy, health—more quickly and reliably. Abundance draws on a substantial literature diagnosing law-made supply constraints in American public policy. Its core question is pragmatic: how to clear regulatory blockages to enable more building. Scholars have long identified such blockages at the intersection of land use and transportation, from highways to high-speed rail. Yet even improved megaprojects would not meet most Americans’ daily transportation needs. And the connection between transportation policy and abundance remains underdeveloped, even as political interest grows.

✨ introducing… ✨

🌇 Transportation for the Abundant Society 🚅

"Abundance" says our problem is artificial scarcity—especially housing. But you can’t build your way out if transportation policy still treats traffic flow as sacred.

Transportation is the binding constraint. ssrn.com/abstract=538...