Daniel Trubman

Transit in the United States is primarily a jobs program:

Believe it or not there's supposedly some pedestrian infrastructure in this photo!

Requiring parents with young kids in a stroller to navigate these long and often steep ramps to get around their own neighborhood just to accommodate highway traffic slicing through dense neighborhoods doesn't seem particularly family-friendly to me.

I enjoyed "A Fortress In Brooklyn" but was shocked how the 2021 book is obviously from a pre-YIMBY/Abundance era.

Authors understood new residents driving displacement were often displaced themselves. But the only conceivable solution was more local subsidized housing.

"Located about a block from the California Blue Line station, the site qualifies as a transit-served location, allowing it to have reduced parking requirements."

Why does Chicago require a new building almost immediately adjacent to a train station include ANY parking at all??

Whole Foods Is Coming to Queens With 22K-SF Deal Whole Foods has signed a lease in Ridgewood, Queens, for its first location in the borough.

This new Whole Foods is probably going to provide more fresh fruits and vegetables for residents than every Community Garden in Queens, huh?

commercialobserver.com/2025/12/whol...

I don't think I'll ever get tired of watching the elevated trains whiz around NYC.

Kind of annoying to see a parking lot so close to the subway though. The Smith–Ninth Streets station is only a 4 minute walk away.

You can be in Manhattan in under 20 minutes!

Blue cities will mock Sunbelt metros for being so dependent on cars while still looking like this in the heart of their urban core:

Look at how Gavin Newsom talks about allowing DUPLEXES on vacant lots. You'd think he was talking about massive towers!

If Dems nominate him in 2028 they'll be surrendering the affordability issue. We'll deserve to lose frankly.

Co-op housing would've been very cool at this transit oriented site in a walkable neighborhood.

But maybe we're making the perfect the enemy of the good. Would mixed-income housing here really be worse than a vacant lot indefinitely??

2157 & 2159 5th Avenue, Harlem
1940s➡️2025

I get why NYCHA transferred these 2 lots in Harlem to a Housing Development Fund Company back in 1997, but time to try something else?

They're now paying property taxes after years of an exemption, but not much as land isn't improved.

Guess HDFCs can be land speculators too?

I don't think New Yorkers should make fun of LA or any other American cities for being overly reliant on cars when so many of our neighborhoods also look (and sound) like this.

Can't emphasize enough how nasty the air smelled by Admiral Triangle Park, immediately adjacent to the BQE. And of course the traffic was pretty loud too.

Time for this Robert Mosses highway to go. Democratic states & cities shouldn't be spending money perpetuating this mistake.

Very excited to see Ryder Kessler is considering another run for the Assembly District covering Greenwich Village, SoHo/NoHo, and Tribeca.

It would be so great to have another pro-housing voice like @ryderkessler.bsky.social up in Albany.

"I can't visit the country without a car!"

Well that wasn't a problem for Angelenos a century ago, who could take the streetcar out to Altadena, then catch the electric traction Mount Lowe Railway to this Swiss-style chalet in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Mount Lowe, circa 1913

The New York City Housing Authority has a nearly $80 BILLION maintenance backlog.

Maybe subsidized parking for Mercedes owners doesn't need to be a priority?

Disappointing to find out this new parking lot at NYCHA's Red Hook West development was a car-free pedestrian walkway only a few years ago 😢

Mill St (just east of Coffey Park)
2025 vs 2016

I knew Co-op City on the Bronx was built on the site of a former amusement park, but I was unaware Freedomland USA had a fully functional aerial lift.

I'm going to count this as one of NYC's lost transit systems.

"Let's not spend a ton of money tunneling through Manhattan just to park the trains there half the day" seems obvious in retrospect, but didn't seem to occur to anyone at the time.

Turtle Bay Residents, Fighting M .T .A. Rail Plan, Heartened by Killing of Proposed Bridge Over Sound (Published 1973)

www.nytimes.com/1973/07/08/a...

Already in 1973 this NY Times article about the fight over the East Side Access project notes there are dozens of skyscrapers up in Turtle Bay.

BUT the handful of well connected homeowners ended up being the ones heard.

With the East Side Access project seemingly having failed to grow transit ridership, I can't help but wonder if things would've been different if the Feds hadn't sided with the NIMBYs opposed to the original proposal for a new terminal on Third Avenue instead of Grand Central?

It's so funny to remember Philadelphia once had a national reputation as a classy, intellectual, and reserved city dominated by old money elite.

None of these agencies have ever seriously studied the revenue maximizing price for fares, so they literally don't know.

But also do you see now the focus on capping obviously is distracting from the more important issue of pass structure?

Important to remember agency focus is unlimited.

The One World Trade Center building might not be as impressive as the nearby crane in Erie Basin Park in this vista from Red Hook, but to be fair it's 3 miles away!

Lowering the overall costs of passes would also of course make transit more financially accessible.

West Side vs. East Side (Access): Upper West Side May Get Metro-North Stop East Side Access, which will give Long Island Rail Road commuters the choice of arriving at Grand Central Terminal in addition to the current terminus at Pennsylvania Station, may get all the buzz …

Wow, @stephenjacobsmith.com wrote this article about West Side Access more than 12 years ago, but I'm not sure we've actually made any progress on reactivating the West Side Line?

observer.com/2013/02/west...

Janno Lieber didn't give any timeline specifics for this study of extending the Second Avenue Subway when I asked him about it at the recent CityLaw Breakfast, but he did mention they're also considering tunneling all the way to a new Hudson Line station in Manhattanville 👀

I don't get why the MTA doesn't offer a day pass, which are pretty common around the world and among US transit agencies.

Especially as they had one not too long ago!

All the buzz is with WEEKLY fare-capping, but many riders would obviously be better off with a day pass.

Here's another kind of silly state property tax exemption in New York.

Clergy Exception only applies to $1,500 of
assessed value, so only costs $200k a year anyway.

I'm sure clergy members appreciate the savings, but what a roundabout way of (barely!) subsidizing religious congregations.