Anna Kramer

Why Car YouTuber Matt Farah Is Fighting for Walkable Cities The outspoken host of “The Smoking Tire” videos and podcasts has become an unlikely advocate for urban transportation policy reforms that limit car use.

“If I have to give up something in order to balance that scale, that’s OK.... I don’t collect sports cars to hurl them into 405 traffic.”

Lots of tensions in here but still a great read

www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Finally, I can’t think of a more obvious moonshot project to spur advanced manufacturing in America generally than making it our goal to have Waymos or robo-Teslas — or any other brand of self-driving taxis that we can make — operating in every city in America. Because if you look under the hood of any Waymo, it is made up of chips, batteries, sensors and other components that also go into every part of the 21st-century industrial ecosystem — including robots, drones and flying cars — all infused with artificial intelligence.

OH MY FUCKING GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. TRAINS! WE NEED TRAINS NOT JETSONS-ASS ROBOT-CAR DEATH MACHINES

Agreed that they're just bluffing - but the fact that they think the (empty) threat is worth the PR risk is kind of wild

Uber says it will exit Colorado if bill aimed at boosting rideshare safety becomes law The California-based company says it could not comply with House Bill 1291 and the measure would pose too big a legal risk. It has never pulled out of a state before.

Quite the look for Uber to be so opposed to *checks notes* a bill about improving rider safety that they're threatening to leave the state entirely.

coloradosun.com/2025/04/23/u...

Punishable by fine = legal for a price

But it was housing (with a yard!) in Boulder that we could afford, so that's what we did.

Let's absolutely make these McMansion teardowns contribute into the affordable housing fund - and let's not assume these old homes are quality affordable housing options either.

It's worth noting that that old duplex was...sub-optimal, shall we say. The floor was just the exposed concrete sub-floor, the ceiling in the bathroom was so low you had to sit in the tub to shower, and there was a 10"-deep hole in the kitchen floor that just never got fixed properly.

A large and expensive-looking two-story home that was built on the same lot after the previous ranch-style duplex was torn down. The caption from Boulder Reporting Lab notes that this new house was recently listed for rent at $15,000 per month and valued at around $4 million.

And after:

A low ranch-style duplex, with a red paint exterior and a fenced-in yard.

Before (when we lived here)

Boulder’s teardown trend is shrinking affordable housing. City may add a fee. The Boulder City Council will consider a new fee on demo-and-rebuild projects that result in increased demand for affordable housing.

A little wild to see a spot we rented in Boulder featured in this piece by @boulderrl.bsky.social about the number of older & smaller homes being torn down and replaced by McMansions.

boulderreportinglab.org/2025/04/06/b...

The thing about ACT UP, as Sarah Schulman notes, is that there wasn’t time for protracted disagreements over strategy; people were dying of AIDS left and right.

SO, if some folks want to do X strategy for a protest but you wanted to do Y, ACT UP’s approach was to say “you do X and I’ll do Y.”

@booker.senate.gov dismantles a Confederate monument.

Hey, @michaelbennet.bsky.social, I expect you to be in line for this, and I expect you to drag Hick’s butt along with you.

Use this to start making amends for approving Rubio. Dude, fix your mistakes with work.

He’s telling you who he is everyday.

So important to note that the threats of arrest and even deportation *to a country not your own* are designed to force students to self-deport, meaning that they’ll never even have the chance of getting their day in court. Hard to overstate how shocking this is

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

Because the quake struck during Friday prayers during Ramadan, we can likely expect an especially heavy toll for Muslim people in Myanmar. Mostly damage was done to large buildings, like places of worship.

But you know, sko buffs, or something.

A screenshot from Boulder Reporting Lab's article. The headline reads "CU Boulder dismantles CU Engage, ends climate and racial justice leadership program" and the subheading reads "The university cites budget constraints in eliminating two long-running programs. Staff say the move signals their work is no longer a priority."

A screenshot from the Daily Camera. The headline reads "Coach Prime lands record-breaking contract extension with CU Buffs." The subheading reads "Deion Sanders has been rewarded with a record-breaking contract after a transformational first two seasons as Colorado’s head football coach." The photo shows Deion Sanders speaking.

Two recent headlines out of CU Boulder. 🙄

Denver Could Soon Eliminate Minimum Parking Requirements | Westword Denver City Council could soon eliminate minimum parking requirements in the city. The Planning Board discussed the proposal on March 19.

"There might be fewer empty parking lots in Denver's future."

Walkability functions as an assumed good in many urbanist circles, and numerous metrics claim to quantify it. We examine one widely used metric, Walk Score, to consider how it extends racialized property formations. In particular, we consider how it relates to concentrations of whiteness, differential investment flows, and property valuations that are already inherently raced. The article illustrates how place (de)valorization co-occurs with racial segregation through a brief examination of Walk Score in Chicago. We situate our critique within literature that challenges the neutrality of walkability metrics and contextualize this neutrality within racial capitalism, arguing that this metric reflects and could contribute to inequitable investment flows and property (de)valuation. By examining these relationships, we argue that Walk Score takes part in reifying the geographies of racial capitalism and caution against algorithms that implicitly or explicitly value certain places above others.

Feedback loop

Is Walk Score white score? Deconstructing a walkability
algorithm in the context of racial capitalism with @annalivia.bsky.social & Frechette (Journal of Race, Ethnicity & the City) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Let's rethink walkability=proximity and place rankings amid racialized inequity

Men are shifting right because Republicans are making their lives worse and telling them to blame women and immigrants.

Democrats should be pointing out this *extremely obvious* dynamic, not trying to peddle a lighter version of the same narrative.

The Schumer solution to the Trump-Musk wrecking ball is to avoid doing anything that would stop the ongoing damage but to insist that Democrats get some of the blame for it moving forward.

Genius.

"More NYC Residents Support Congestion Pricing Than Oppose It" Bar graph comparing Siena College polling data of NYC residents from December 2024 to March 2025. December 2024: 32% Support congestion pricing, 56% oppose it. March 2025: 42% support congestion pricing, 35% oppose it.

Today's Siena College poll shows a dramatic turnaround from a December poll.

Now, more NYC residents think that congestion pricing should stick around compared to those who want Trump to end the life-changing policy. nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/03/10/s...

re the previous repost: if they can disappear permanent residents they can disappear citizens

“The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my fucking firing. I make $50k a year and work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.”

Just got a tip from a guy at the FAA. You'll never believe who is still getting new government contracts while all the contracts at the Department of Education and USAID and other agencies are being nuked from orbit.

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Remembering Donald Shoup - Parking Reform Network Professor Donald Shoup’s curiosity, intelligence, passion, generosity, and kindness allowed him to not only expose the critical problems with modern parking policy, but to also ignite and nurture a…

We should all be so fortunate, when our meter runs out of time, to leave behind a group of reformers dedicated to continuing our work parkingreform.org/donald-shoup/