City Observatory

Congestion Pricing: The one policy that has been proven to reduce congestion, improve safety, lower air pollution, speed buses (and making them cheaper & more productive), plus reduce noise pollution--and the city government road department is treating it as a state secret. Shame!

Important, exciting research — air pollution dropped 22% in NYC's congestion relief zone within the first 6 months of #CongestionPricing (with reductions in the surrounding neighborhoods, too)

Cleaner air, better transit, great data — all thanks to #CongestionPricing!

Can speed cameras make streets safer? Quasi-experimental evidence from New York City | PNAS Each year, approximately 40,000 people die in vehicle collisions in the United States, generating $340 billion in economic costs. To make roads saf...

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

When cameras are installed, they issue many violations in the first month, followed by a steep decline in the second month. This suggests that the cameras effectively deter speeding by changing underlying driver behavior rather than relying on sustained revenue extraction.

Opinion: One Less Lane Ought To Fix It — Streetsblog USA Federal inaction means states must lead on reducing emissions — but their reluctance to reallocate road space for cars may doom climate goals.

California Air Resources Board: "To achieve climate goals, we need less driving"
Transportation Researchers: "To reduce driving, we need fewer lane miles"

Caltrans: "We need billions of dollars to keep widening highways."
California Legislature: "You got it."

usa.streetsblog.org/2025/12/02/o...

Oregon's climate fail

https://cityobservatory.org/oregons-climate-fail/

Wetware-Hardware Centaurs, Not Digital Gods: Wednesday MAMLMs Faster GPUs won’t conjure a world model from out of thin air we’re scaling mimicry, not understanding: that is my guess as to why the MAMLM frontier is spiky, with breathtaking benchmarks...

This is AI: braddelong.substack.com/p/wetware-ha... Using a roiling boil of 3000-dimensional linear algebra to output the word-sequences I hope will please the human, w/o having any idea what the words mean, 'cos I have zero world model & understand neither events nor time nor duration as concepts.

what concerns?

that they're actually affordable?

they aren't massive?

they're less deadly to pedestrians and cyclists?

Ex-official explained this in a way that will stick with me forever: Within fire departments, the EMTs are overworked and underpaid and don’t have time to advocate for policy. The fire chiefs, on the other hand, have a lot more time on their hands. So fire response, not medical, dictates policy.

At 100k vehicles daily, you would need to charge a one way toll of about $9 to pay for a $5 billion project. Charging users anything less than $9 per trip means you are subsidizing them to take this roadway. Cars and trucks are the real welfare bums.

Anyways they should try tolling this thing and seeing how many people actually use it.

Everyone constantly is like “truck this, truck that” when a super majority of users are cars.

Interesting new working paper that studies chains of movers after the construction of a new apartment building in Honolulu.

Paper finds that the project resulted in the opening up other, lower cost, housing on the island, benefiting the housing market overall.

Opinion: The Frog that saved Portland - Portland Business Journal Authors Leslie Carlson and Joe Cortright write that the frog is a symbol of resistance. It may also be a symbol of a city reborn.

Leaning into the frog at PDX. Happy Thanksgiving! @queenleslie1982.bsky.social
Joe Cortright and Leslie Carlson on Portland's game-changing frogs - Portland Business Journal share.google/BzHqAAqyuo7c...

The "models" always produce dire consequences for 10-20 years from now, because they are predicated on assumptions of continued growth in traffic, which simply won't be realized if capacity is not provided to allow that growth.

This is a fundamental bias of the models: they assume a fixed volume of cars, regardless of capacity. Not surprisingly, this generally un-stated assumption suits the interests of the highway builders.

...in Seattle and in Washington. Using traffic models that assume current car volume is a political choice. At the very least in this workgroup we should be presented with projects of how we could induce less car volume in the heart of our city by reducing available highway merge lanes.

Why are we starting with the assumption that we should plan for traffic volumes that are the same as current volumes? Traffic responds to induced demand. If it's easier, faster and cheaper to drive, more people will drive. The opposite is also true. If we want more people to ride transit, we...

YouTube video by wsdot Judkins Park Community Advisory Group Meeting 4

Why are we assuming that we want to maintain car volumes? To meet our climate, public health and road safety goals as a city, there is no reason any on or off ramp in #Seattle should require multiple lanes. #Rainier
If you want to be angry, watch (starts at 1:05): youtu.be/Lr-C4k0EEf4?...

This is a city on Robo-Taxis. (Don't let it happen to yours.)

Engineers think it’s a liquid but traffic is a gas. Give it space and it’ll fill it up. Take it away and it disperses

Exclusive: Le Dip streetery to come down as D.C. crackdown reshapes outdoor dining It's over for many D.C. streeteries, as the city starts to charge what you might call "road rent" and other fees.

DC is enforcing a “crackdown” on streeteries—outdoor seating for cafes—charging the cafes huge amounts of money to keep the facilities in place, and forcing them to use seating that doesn’t work in the winter. It’s a huge self-own, likely to end up hurting businesses, reducing street vibrancy.

Train Wreck: Will transit sink the Interstate Bridge Project?

https://cityobservatory.org/train-wreck-will-transit-sink-the-interstate-bridge-project/

Somebody needs to tell state departments of transportation. Looking at you, @oregondot.bsky.social, always claiming we need to spend billions to widen roads for "safety."

www.realtor.com/news/trends/walkable-neighborhoods-premium-home-prices

You gotta pay more for houses with walkability because we don't build nearly enough of them...

Walkability shouldn't be a "perk"

It should be the default

Small Single-Stairway Apartment Buildings Have Strong Safety Record Policymakers could increase the supply of multifamily housing in their states and localities by revising outdated building codes that require more than one stairway in small apartment buildings. If en...

"In fact, building codes in the United States draw a number of hard and expensive lines between low- and high-density forms of development that are not found abroad."

See: www.pew.org/en/research-...

Transit fare taps on Paris region transit systems, 2019 through 2025.

Car traffic on the Paris ring highway (in blue) and within the city of Paris itself (in red), 2019–2025.

Cycling trips in Paris and western suburbs (Hauts-de-Seine), 2020–2025.

Ridership on Paris region transit systems is now generally at or higher than pre-pandemic levels. Bike use is much higher than pre-pandemic.

At the same time, car traffic in Paris and on its ring highway is substantially lower than it was pre-pandemic. www.institutparisregion.fr/mobilite-et-...

Key Bridge rebuild could top out at $5.2B, memo shows The cost of rebuilding the collapsed Baltimore bridge has more than doubled, according to a document viewed by POLITICO.

$5 billion for Baltimore's Key bridge? Hold my beer, says @oregondot.bsky.social, the Interstate Bridge Project is gonna get to $10 billion. Key Bridge rebuild could top out at $5.2B, memo shows - POLITICO share.google/FL1Swk17AF3r...

The iconic “Public Market Center” sign and clock at Pike Place Market.

The Post’s criticism of the mayor-elect’s plans for government-run grocery stores amused me, because the Pike Place Market is government-run, the best place in town for groceries for over 100 years, and a major tourist attraction

LAX approved $1.5 billion to relieve traffic. Opponents say it won’t work Los Angeles World Airports Board of Airport Commissioners this week approved the final $1-billion phase of spending for its new roadway improvement plan around LAX. It's set to be complete just two mo...

LAX traffic planners still haven't figured out "induced demand," critics say: www.latimes.com/california/s...

As part of safety push, motor assist on DC e-bikes is slowing down - WTOP News D.C. is reducing speed limits on Lime and Veo e-bikes to improve safety and curb misuse. Lime’s motor assist is now capped at 18 mph, while Veo’s is limited to 15 mph, down from the previous 20 mph. T...

Now do cars. Headline: DC is slowing down scooters and e-bikes to make roads safer.
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