World Bike Forward

How the white brick curve speaks to the circle of glass in the church next door. Southwark, London

Still think he should hire Sliwa for Staten Island outreach

Car brain

Main football stadium in Freiburg, Germany. Fits almost 35 thousand people, but the only on-site parking spaces are the ones you see. It does have 3,700 bike-parking spaces. Every game ticket includes free passage on 18 different transit providers: trams, buses, local trains, regional trains.

Late Art Deco 1939 Banespa building downtown São Paulo

Rather liked this schematic on a sales brochure for new building in São Paulo. Shows what's reachable in 2, 3, or 5 minutes walking, including subway stations, or on the outermost line 10 minutes biking. No info on parking, thank you.

Whataboutism is not much of an argument. The fact of a rather dismal history of corruption in American public housing (and zoning) doesn't mean there aren't all kinds of other corruption happening. As to the list of insults, they are the last refuge of...

That sounds like very few

Vienna is smaller than NYC but allows more new housing. 60% isn't public at all and most of the rest is publicly guided, not owned. Excellent century-old balanced system. Worth emulating, but as proof of concept easily balanced with failures of concept elsewhere, if the only concept is being public.

Your rent is high because your local authorities reward the holders of capital in the form of existing housing by blocking others from building more. It's not because of the private costs of building vs the public costs.

What happens to bike uptake and safety when you build protected cycle networks

70 Current And Former NYCHA Employees Charged With Bribery And Extortion Offenses Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York; Merrick B. Garland, the Attorney General of the United States; Jocelyn E. Strauber, the Commissioner of the New York ...

The problem is the costs are not the same, because the capital discipline is missing. Corruption is just one aspect of that. I'm all for public housing done right, but it's no panacea as a concept, especially at scale. www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr...

Have you seen the finances of the largest public-housing authority in America? The price actually does stay stable, but costs are out of control, the debt is unpayable, corruption is normal, and the heat keeps going out in winter. If you get the mix just right, you get a Vienna, but that's rare.

NYPD and their cars. Lawsuit says it was intentional. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/n...

EVs are better than fuel-burning cars, but take the same urban space. Here we can fit five cars, but eight bikes are in the space of one car and two more in the corner. Gripsholm, Sweden

People from Bangladesh migrated to England in numbers from about the 1950s to 1970s. Street signs in their London neighborhood of Spitalfields, now half gentrified, remain.

SFMTA data: Drivers a lot slower around cameras Pedestrian-safety advocates say “encouraging” findings should prompt more action.

No surprise that the results of speed cameras in San Francisco are the same as everywhere else: they work. On the block with the most abuses, people speeding at least 11 mph over the limit dropped from 31% of all drivers to 3%. www.sfexaminer.com/news/transit...

Swedish small-town urbanism, Trosa

I hear that. Often places like that don't have cut-throughs even for people walking or riding a bike. You have to drive the whole labyrinth to get from one house to another or to the outside world. The two places in this video both have subways close, visible in the Sweden clip behind the bikes.

In these two places that might paralyze the cars, but not the neighborhood, since most people aren't moving around by car ☺(Central Stockholm and Copacabana, Rio)

Further up the same Stockholm street from the clip below is another traffic-calming device: intersections where cars may cross but the design is a sidewalk with low curb. Drivers tend to inch across, some of them likely not sure if they're really supposed to be there.

Urban cul-de-sacs are a cheap, immediate way to calm down side streets. Cars can reach any address, but not cut through. Foot traffic instead good for business.

This 1970s mosaic by Burle Marx has been called the largest work of public art in the world. Three miles by 160 feet of individual hammered stones, not counting the paved lanes, in classic Portuguese red, black, and white only. Leme and Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro.

In 2010 I was stuck in traffic in a black cab on London's Victoria Embankment. The driver blamed it on construction of a ridiculous "Cycle Superhighway" along the route by the idiots at Transport for London, even though no one would use it because Londoners don't cycle. Here it is at rush hour now.

*Me listening in on a lady who just tried an ebike for the first time and came back to the bike shop*

"That was amazing! I felt like I had super powers. I have to get my husband to try one!"

And yes, she bought the bike. It was a Gazelle.

One smart, cheap, urban response to global warming: shade canopies. Seville, Spain

Seems you've missed all the important ways to stop the slaughter: street design to slow cars, networks of real bike lanes, speed cameras, lower speed limits, red-light cameras, safer SUV design, that sort of thing.

Can't get over this building. Liège, Belgium train station by Calatrava and the Jetsons.

Blue skies in Lisbon. Doesn't hurt that at this station electric bikes and scooters connect to electric trams, which connect to antique electric trams, which connect to electric buses, which connect to electric surface trains, which connect to electric subway trains. Even electric ferries out back.

The rapture, but for cars in cities.