Active Towns has just posted an hour-long conversation with me, one that takes me a little deeper than usual into my professional work as a transit planning consultant. My video was a little fuzzy at times, but it’s all clear enough. This is a good deep dive into what I’m about, especially for those with a professional or geeky interest in transit network design.
It’s also listenable as a podcast. You don’t have to have the visuals to make sense of it. It’s here.
My friend David Bragdon (the former head of TransitCenter and former elected head of the Portland area’s regional government) has a good, through article at Eno on the problem facing rural bus service, generally defined as services more than 50 miles long not primarily intended for commuting. He’s not focused on links between big cities, which have air and (sometimes) rail options, and where bus services are often still profitable. The concern is all the smaller towns that had commercial bus service 50 years ago, but generally no longer do. These towns have lots of people who need to get to nearby bigger towns for medical services, errands, shopping, and other needs that they can’t get locally. I call these services “rural intertown” but note that the difficulty of describing this category is probably part of why it’s so neglected.
This should be not be a left-right issue, and mostly isn’t. Congress, with ample support from rural Republican lawmakers, has long supported a Federal funding program called 5311(f) which provides funding for needed bus links that no longer exist commercially. But this funding is basically a grant to the state Departments of Transportation, which can spend it on whatever bus service they like. Bragdon observes that some states are doing great things with this money, creating statewide lifeline networks focused on towns that would otherwise be abandoned, but that other states often just give the money to private carriers like Greyhound, without even checking their claims that the subsidy is needed to keep some service running. “In short,” Bragdon writes, “many state DOTs spend a lot of money, particularly on highways but to some extent on buses, without explaining what they’re trying to achieve.”
Bragdon is arguing, in short, that like urban transit, intercity lifeline service should be planned. At its root, planning is the process of identifying goals and making sure that a plan of action actually meets them cost-effectively. I agree, and anyone interested in this challenge should read his article.
There’s an overlapping problem, though, when we’re talking about shorter corridors (under 80 miles or so) and there are enough towns along the way to justify service every day and several times a day. Here, the obstacle may be the county-level organization of transit, which gives no agency the job of serving the entire corridor. I addressed that in the next post.
In the US, public transit is often organized at the county level, so the service ends where the county does. There are countless situations like this, where two significant cities are 20-80 miles apart with a county line separating them:
If transit is provided by county-level agencies, the service in this situation looks like this:
The two transit agencies probably have the best of intentions. They’ve probably worked together to find a common stop in Town 2 where they meet. They may or may not have planned the schedules so that the buses meet and people can connect between them to travel to the big cities. But even if they’ve done that, the end-to-end connection is a gratuitous hassle. You have to get off one bus and onto another, and worse, there’s a well-above-zero risk that you’ll be stranded if an arriving bus is late.
The better service, and the greater access to opportunity, arises from doing this:
If this corridor is important enough, the county level agencies may have merged to resolve this problem, but usually they haven’t. Mostly I’m talking about cases where City A and City B are the centers of counties that have numerous internal travel demands, including to other towns in other directions, so that this particular corridor isn’t the most important thing they do. In fact, it may seem rather peripheral to them. What’s more, if they are just running to a small town near the county line, the ridership probably isn’t that great, which means that there’s not much impetus to improve things.
So if the county-level agencies aren’t able to combine their services, the state Department of Transportation should look at this situation and see if they can use their leverage to create a solution. This could mean leaning on the county-level agencies to solve the problem, or it could mean creating (or enhancing) a state intercity bus product to handle these situations.
None of this is easy. Like all organizations, county level transit operations may feel threatened by the loss of role, importance, or access to funding. They may be bound up with different labor contracts, which can be especially hard to reform. A state bus route taking over some local services in the county will need fare integration with the rest of the local system. But states that want great statewide transit networks need to care about this issue. A lot of service is already tied up in these county-level rural links, and they won’t always run the most efficient patterns if they are trapped by county lines.
Like most people who plan public transit, I hate cutting service. Most cities that I work in have obvious markets where more transit would attract more ridership and expand the possibilities of people’s lives. So of course I hate taking service away.
But sometimes we have to. Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been two large reasons that transit service can’t be sustained:
There are two kinds of service cuts, random and planned. When you hear discussion of service cuts, it’s usually about planned cuts. But the alternative to planned cuts is random cuts, so it’s important to know what those are.
Random cuts happen in the course of operations, when not enough drivers show up for work. There are always a certain number of drivers calling in sick, and agencies manage this by paying some spare drivers to be on hand at the operating base, to fill in whatever runs would otherwise be missed. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, these processes were overwhelmed by the number of employees not coming to work. Even today, many US agencies are failing to deliver some of their scheduled service due to lack of staff.
These cuts are random and unpredictable. In many cases, a particular bus never pulls out of the operating base in the morning because the driver of that bus didn’t show up, and there weren’t enough spare drivers on hand. So every trip that bus was going to do will just not be served. In other cases, operations managers are more proactive at reassigning drivers so that the most urgently needed service is saved. In either case, the customer experience is that sometimes their bus doesn’t show up, and there is no way to plan ahead for that because it might happen today but not tomorrow. It all depends on who showed up for work that morning and what decisions were made on the fly at the operating base.
This is a very bad situation, and it’s sadly routine. Why is it still happening at some agencies so long after the pandemic? Because many decision-makers are deciding that random cuts are better than planned cuts. Let’s look at why this happens, and why it’s almost always the wrong choice.
During the pandemic, I happened to be working closely with San Francisco Muni, and one thing that really impressed me is that all through the crisis, they made every effort to plan their scheduled service to match their shrunken workforce. It was chaos in the first months of the pandemic, as it was everywhere, but as soon as they could, they intentionally designed a stripped down network that they could operate reliably with the reduced workforce they still had. Ever since then, as the workforce as grown, they have been gradually and strategically bringing service back. They currently report that over 99% of their scheduled service is operating, far above what many agencies are achieving. Why? Because they designed the scheduled service to be operable in their actual situation.
But to do this, they’ve had to endure a lot of outrage. Riders unite against planned service cuts, because they’re visible and intentional. There’s a staff person putting them forward who makes an easy villain. Sometimes that staff person will even be framed as advocating the cuts, which is ridiculous. Professional transit planners are almost all transit advocates. They want to expand service. If they’re proposing to cut it, it’s because the alternative is worse.
If an agency lacks the staff to run its schedule reliably, then a refusal to cut service in a planned way will just cause more service to be cut randomly. Planned cuts mean that you know that the bus you use will know longer be there, but you can be confident that that one two blocks away, or the one five minutes later, will be there. You will grumble, but it’s likely you can adapt to that. Random cuts, on the other hand, undermine the transit experience for everyone, and do so in a way that nobody can plan for. Sharing the pain among everyone may seem fair, but it’s also a good way to drive away a much larger share of the ridership.
So every time you hear a transit authority debating service cuts, ask what the alternative to the planned cuts is. Is there really a pot of money that can keep the service running? Or is there a workforce limitation, as there is in many cities, that will make an uncut service inoperable? If it’s the latter, then you can make a big show of opposing the scheduled service cuts. But all you’ll have done is condemn riders to random cuts, day after day, which will do far more to undermine confidence in the service.
Eight years ago, I experienced 10 seconds of Elon Musk’s attention. The occasion was my criticism of his idea, now being implemented by his Boring Company, that the future of urban transportation was cars running in tunnels — tunnels that he claimed to be able to build so cheaply that there would just no longer be any barrier to building as many as we might need. It was clear to me at once that this was a very low-capacity solution to a problem that required much higher capacity — the kind of capacity only provided by real public transit.
I have written several other articles on these themes over the years, many mentioning Musk as a technicolor example of common fallacies in tech industry thinking about urban transportation. In the new edition of my book Human Transit, I laid out a more thorough critique of the most developed example of the Boring Company vision, the “Vegas Loop” that serves the Las Vegas Convention Center and nearby hotels. It had just been approved for a large citywide expansion featuring over 60 stations. I had studied whatever I could find explaining the concept — which wasn’t much — and explained why I felt that a system that sort-of worked with four stations would be a fiasco with more than 60.
But I must admit that until last week, I hadn’t actually ridden it. Now I have.
Last weekend I found myself in Las Vegas for my nephew’s wedding, and had a few hours to spare. So I did some walking, rode the monorail, and tried the Loop. Until recently, the service had been confined to stations within the Las Vegas Convention Center complex, and thus not always open to the public. But now there are two stations outside that complex, Westgate and Resorts World, so I rode from one to the other.
The monorail delivered me to Westgate station, where a short walk took me to the Westgate Loop station.
An attendant was there to help me pay my fare with a QR code, and pointed me to a car. It was about 9:30 on a Sunday morning, so I knew I wouldn’t be seeing the Loop’s alleged ability to handle big crowds. Instead, there was Tesla parked at the station, with a friendly driver. One odd detail is that he was parked on his left, so that I had to go into the roadway to board on the right. Other than that, it was exactly like boarding an Uber or Lyft Tesla, including the perennial difficulty of hooking up the seatbelt.
Once I was secured, we took off, driving slowly through the narrow tunnels. Two screens provided ample distraction, about half of it advertising.
Famously, the colors of the lights in the tunnels change — as lights do all over Las Vegas. This was supposed to make it feel modern or fun. What I saw instead was the narrowness of the tunnel, barely wider than the car. I wondered about emergency exits.
Finally, we arrived, queued behind one other car, at an underground intersection, with a standard red-and-white-striped barrier blocking our path. A man was standing around in a bright yellow jacket, much like the people you’ll see standing around in many kinds of transport infrastructure, not doing much but presumably ready to jump into action as needed.
Looking to my right, the view partly obstructed by the screen’s reflection in the window, I saw we’d arrived at a complex underground intersection. There was a little booth for the man, as though he might be going to collect tolls. Except for the reflected screen, it all looked like infrastructure from 1970 or so.
We waited here for over a minute, which happens sometimes in public transit but is very much not the Boring Company pitch. It appeared that the next bit of tunnel we needed to use was “single-track,” used by cars in both directions, so we had to wait for an oncoming car to come out of it. Then, our barrier lifted and we went on our way.
We arrived at our destination, a trip of about 4 minutes of which one was spent waiting at that intersection. This station, deep under Resorts World, had the same features: A QR code to pay the fare, an agent in a yellow jacket, and some people standing around.
Walking out, I gazed back at the station. It looks exactly like three Uber Teslas lined up at a curb in a parking structure, a space dominated by roadways that scream “keep out” to the pedestrian.
So, I tweeted:
My most loyal reply-guy was right there in an instant.
And this was the perfect reply to make my point! To a certain kind of tech fantasist, their vision is so self-justifying that the only people who would question it must be those who haven’t experienced it yet. This guy really thought that somehow, riding a Tesla through a tunnel (as opposed to reading and watching videos about it, which I’d done at length) would be a revelation that would overcome all my professional doubts about how such a low-capacity system could possibly scale. At the same time, he was sharing images of the much better Vegas Loop of the future, with an extended network and sexier driverless vehicles. This amounted to admitting that experience of the current demonstration project is not adequate to convey how cool this is, and how that coolness will supposedly someday get me to stop thinking about math.
Fortunately, there are a few journalists who share my skepticism about this project. ProPublica did a recent piece focused more on the project’s failure to keep up its agreements with local governments that allowed it to be built. They note that the big news event in May 2023, the Clark County Commission’s approval of the expansion plan, featured an opaque agenda item that didn’t even mention the Vegas Loop explicitly. More importantly, they note that the kind of justification document that would exist for any publicly funded project just doesn’t seem to exist. The Boring Company does not seem to want to show their math, either on their own website (where they should expect curious transport geeks to be looking) or in a submission to local government.
It’s remarkable to me that the Clark County Commission approved this, with the head of the convention bureau calling it “the only viable way” to manage traffic on the Las Vegas Strip. Obviously, if there are no other options, there’s no need for analysis, but every transport planner knows how absurd that is. Other options include:
Was it easy to say yes because the Boring Company wasn’t asking for public money? Certainly, but they are still taking something valuable: an enormous amount of underground real estate in public streets. This will have the effect of preventing a properly scaled subway from ever being built because its path will be blocked by this warren of too-small tunnels.
I don’t expect to influence the debate in Las Vegas from afar. The region has its own distinctive politics, and a particular notion about how to serve and entertain people that is unrelated to the principles of liberating urban transport. But like many, I do find it fascinating as a case study, one that other cities should think about.
If this technology escapes from Las Vegas and threatens a bigger, denser city, that will be a more critical battle. In 2022, Vox’s Avishay Artsy and Alissa Walker did a roundup of the state of action at the time, noting all the elected officials around the US who were expressing vague support for Boring Company projects. But they also noted that the company tends not to follow through when they encounter the typical legal and infrastructural complexities of almost any large city. Is some of this excessive regulation? Maybe, but some of it is just people demanding that before you build something this impactful, you should lay out the math, and answer questions, to prove it’s the best alternative. That’s all I’d be asking too.
The image of the Las Vegas monorail that’s supposed to excite you is something like this:
But of course, the other side of that image is this:
That’s the view from the inside, thanks to that advertising wrap that covers the outside.
I was just in Las Vegas for my nephew’s wedding, so of course I checked out the monorail. It presents itself as a serious transit service, with all the station features you’d expect in a metro.
I wish the interior were open gangway, but instead it’s a series of little closed pods:
The view? Better if you’re further from the window, certainly, so that the advertising wrap imposes a dull blurring effect instead of the pixellated one above.
But sometimes you want to look out your own window, so the effect is unavoidable:
What’s this thing all about? Why are there so few people on it? Well, it’s the fare (over $5 for a single ride) but also the fact that it’s built to connect the backsides of several casino hotels, but goes nowhere else. In the north it stops just short of downtown. In the south it stops just short of the airport.
So anyway, I arrived at the rather downscale looking Westgate station. Why there? The Vegas Loop!
The monorail began as a private investment to connect certain casinos that had a common owner, but it was later taken over by government. However, the conversation about extending it to make it more useful seems to have stalled, partly of course because Elon Musk’s Teslas-in-tunnels project, the Vegas Loop, is at the moment the cool new thing. What do I think of the Vegas Loop? The full argument is in Chapter 4 of my book, but you can also go for a ride with me on it, in the next post.
The Freewheeling podcast in the UK has just posted a new interview of me. It was a fun conversation about new ways to think about public transport in the context of the reforms that the UK is undertaking. Hope you enjoy.
My friend and competitor James Llamas on the streets of Manhattan yesterday. He says he can’t take credit for the sign.
January 5, 2025 will be an important date in urban history. It’s the day that the idea of charging motorists to drive into a dense city center — already routine in Singapore, Stockholm, and London — first arrived in the Western Hemisphere. New York City’s Congestion Relief Zone, covering Manhattan south of 60th Street, will charge $9 for cars at most times of day. Trucks pay more based on weight, and the charge for all vehicles is reduced by 75% overnight.
For the first time in a Western Hemisphere city, there is a fair price to pay for taking up wildly valuable land in the urban core for the movement of your private vehicle. To put it another way, there’s a fair discount for all of the people who move around the city, contributing just as much to its life and economy, without taking all that space. The money collected will go largely to supporting desperately needed improvements to the transit network, so that more people will find it useful and even fewer will feel the need to drive.
(No, I’m not going to call it congestion pricing. That term was coined by economists and, like many academic terms, it’s useful in technical discourse but misleading on the street. It reminds me of other brands coined by opponents, like death taxes. You’ve combined two ideas people hate, congestion and pricing, and then you wonder why people don’t like it. I’ve advocated for decongestion pricing, because that says what the price buys, but I’m certainly fine with the emerging term Congestion Relief Zone. The problem is that opponents are always trying to imply that you’re just taking money without producing a benefit, so the benefit has to be right there in the name.)
What’s the point of road prices? The purpose is to expand freedom in the city by enabling more people to reach more destinations in less time so that they can have better lives, all without getting in each other’s way. As everyone who has studied this knows, and almost nobody else does, nothing works as well as prices to nudge some people make choices that reduce the harms they inadvertently do to others. And when you seize a big chunk of real estate in a dense city for your moving car, you are taking that space from other people. In congestion, your car obstructs the movement of other people who have as much right as you to be there. The Congestion Relief Zone will also increase overall freedom because more people will be able to access opportunity by all modes of transport, including by car.
The fight to make this happen has been epic. The way this issue polarizes urban vs suburban voters is terrifying to elected officials. New York Governor Kathy Hochul postponed the plan just as it was about to take effect in July 2024, and revived it, with a lower toll that will achieve lower benefits, only after the 2024 general election was past. Like all big steps, the consensus for the plan was cobbled together out of people who care about different things, under the overwhelming force of looming financial disaster for public transit in the US’s biggest and densest city. The plan finally happened partly because nobody could come up with a better way to fund the necessary repairs and modernizations in a transit network that everybody recognized as essential to the region’s economic life.
Many people are still furious, and while there are legitimate concerns (and have been many compromises already to address them) much of the whining now is largely self-incriminating. The region seems to contain a large number of people who can perfectly well afford $9 but would rather spend unlimited sums to trumpet their righteous entitlement to consume expensive real estate for free. There are of course tradespeople who need to get around in vans or trucks and will need to pass on the cost to their customers, as they should. A journalist found a real estate mogul who wanted to pose as a man-on-the-street at 61st & 3rd Avenue His complaint was that the one way street system requires him to enter the zone even though he lives outside of it, and that the $9 charge will prevent him from visiting his family 18 blocks away. Local impacts around a zone boundary are a legitimate issue, but in his case the replies are understandably not sympathetic.
I did just enough tweeting about this over the next two days to feel some of the wrath …
… and I understand it. This moment puts experts like me in the worst situation, saying: “We know this sounds awful, but trust us, it won’t be that bad.” But they don’t trust us, so we just have to breathe, accept their rage for a while, and wait for the evidence. People will adapt as they always have, in order to make things better than they expected. The first Monday morning is pretty encouraging:
Source: https://www.congestion-pricing-tracker.com/ … but at the moment I can’t get it to load. Probably lots of advocates updating their views by the minute.
This is important. The new regime in Washington may figure out a way to turn the system off, but they can never erase the data that it produced. And if it goes as it went on London and Stockholm, by then some people will already be saying it’s not so bad, and that it sure is nice to have Lincoln Tunnel moving!
Blaise Pascal knew he was dying. He was in his 30s and had been sick most of his life, but at least he didn’t have to worry about being forgotten. He had already made transformative innovations in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and theology, and in his spare time he was assembling a collection of thoughts about God that would become the Pensées, which has been praised as some of the finest prose ever written in the French language. He was fortunate to live at a time (the mid-1600s) when, if you were born to the right parents, nobody told you you needed to specialize.
So what did he do with the last lucid days of his life? He invented fixed route public transport.
The vehicle used by Pascal’s service. Note that each had a fixed sign advertising the endpoints of the route. But who cares about the vehicle? What matters is the service. Source: Taras Grescoe’s Substack.
Wikipedia currently says he invented the bus line, but that’s too narrow. Pascal’s network, which he called carrosses a cinq sols or “five penny carriages” used eight-passenger horse-drawn carriages, but they did what fixed route public transport does. They operated predictable frequencies along multiple connecting routes, forming a network. This is not just the ancestor of every city bus, but also of every train or tram.
Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed. Pascal’s idea was that even though carriages could go from anywhere to anywhere on Paris’s street network, a special kind of usefulness would arise if they didn’t do that, but instead followed paths that people could remember and plan around.
Here is the map of his complete network design:
Frequency ranged from 7.5 minutes to 15 minutes, so these came often enough that people could just go out and wait for them, not worrying about a schedule. Their main failure was overcrowding and pass-ups, which of course is a kind of success. Obviously, someone needed to invent a larger horse-drawn vehicle for this purpose, but that would wait a while still. The first line began on March 18, 1662 and the whole network was operating by July, just before Pascal’s death, a pace of implementation that is hard to imagine today. It’s likely that Pascal spent many of his final days thinking about this, when he wasn’t writing immortal prose about God.
If you want to trace the history of public transport from its roots in Pascal’s invention, please read this beautiful piece by the transit-obsessed travel and food writer Taras Grescoe. Here, I want to go a little deeper into understanding what this service was.
Gazing at the map, I recognize many of the eternal principles of fixed route transit planning: The lines try to remain far from each other, converging only on major destinations. They are often perpendicular, which maximizes the odds that a connection between those routes will make lots of trips possible. There are more or less straight lines running across the city — because where demand is spread uniformly, a straight line is more likely to match people’s desires than a winding one — and there’s an orbital line, yellow on the map that goes all the way around the edge in a two way loop. Orbitals are a common shape because they make such effective connections with radial lines, and their length means they connect an unusual number of origins and destinations directly.
At age 11, Pascal had re-derived much of Euclid’s geometry from scratch because his father kept the books from him, thinking he was still too young. So, dying at 38, Pascal probably could sense that these principles were mathematically right, even though they’d never been written down before.
But as a network designer I wanted to know more. How did this map come about? Did Pascal ever explain the design himself? What explains the biggest exceptions to the principles? The routes aren’t as straight as they could be. And why do so many of the lines converge at Luxembourg Palace in the southwest? Much of the government was around there, but still, was that really such a hub of citywide demand? I asked this question in English and French on both X and Bluesky, but I am not plugged into the French Enlightenment Transport History networks that must be out there, and most of Pascal’s biographers didn’t think this invention merited much discussion. I did find this French article by Rémi Mathis[1] which shares some speculations. (My loose translation.)
The first route [red on the map above] leads from Rue Saint-Antoine to Luxembourg, serving the Châtelet, the Île de la Cité and the Saint-Germain fair: it is clearly aimed at the bourgeoisie and la petite robe …and one will notice too that the routing links Pascal’s house with that of [his close friend and collaborator] Roannez while passing by that of the Arnauld family [close friends and the leaders of the abbey where Pascal’s sister lived].
A second and third route soon opened. They had to re-sequence their priorities when the king asked if there could be a route passing through the Louvre [presumably the orange line above]. The public mobbed the services to the point that often, several would pass by before there was room to board. Attempts were then made to take advantage of this influx of customers: “The merchants of the rue Saint-Denis are asking for a road with such insistence that they even talk of submitting a request [presumably to the king] for one.”
Finally, in order to connect the routes together and allow connections with the whole city, the fourth route [yellow on map above], opened on June 24, 1662, was circular.
Now, this sounds very much like how you might think bus network planning is done, if you just follow journalism about it: It’s easy to assume that key leaders first look after themselves, connecting their own homes and destinations.[2] Then, various powerful interest groups ask for a route, and the strong temptation is to draw a separate route for each of them. Finally the local equivalent of royalty get involved, “asking” in ways that everyone understands to be a command. This story is sometimes partly true in my experience, but tends to be exaggerated. Many journalists are rewarded for making people angry about the selfishness of the powerful, so they tend to emphasize that aspect of the process. You might not even know that, if your community is lucky, some smart planners are actually thinking hard about how to serve the whole city well.
Pascal was one of those smart people. His network design is much more logical than many of the networks I’ve seen that grew through the selfish demands of the few. He’s running the fewest possible route miles to sustain the highest possible frequency, for example, rather than letting routes “fray” into infrequent variants in order to get closer to more important people. On his map, the L-shaped red line, the first to be opened, looks rather political, but the rest all roughly fit the pattern of a network of radials and orbitals, designed to connect well with each other and thus maximize the number of origins and destinations connected in a reasonable travel time.
The fare, which was part of the service’s name, was intended to be affordable to a broad midsection of the Parisian social and economic scale. Obviously, urban elites continued to hire carriages just for themselves, just as they grab an Uber for all their trips now. But for the rest of the population, the only option had been to walk long distances across the city, often on muddy or icy streets whose poor maintenance and informal sanitation functions are barely imaginable to us today.
It worked. It wasn’t just popular, but it achieved a degree of social mixing that characterizes all large-scale public transport. One commentator notes that some relatively fortunate people still chose them:
Sauval, historian of Paris, states that “everyone after all, for two years, found these carriages so convenient that auditors and masters of accounts, advisers at the Châtelet and the court had no difficulty in using them to come to the Châtelet and the Palace”
Here is another distant echo of a pattern from today: Government employees are more likely to use public transport than private sector employees. But more generally, a service designed to be efficient and thus affordable will attract a diversity of riders, including many who don’t really need the fare to be that cheap. As a result, public transport, then as now, is a place where classes mix, and find no reason to be fearful of each other.
Again, read Taras Grescoe’s fine piece on the full legacy of Pascal’s invention. Today, I just wanted to share my incomplete probings on the network design. I will update this post if I learn more. Meanwhile, if you know anyone who is likely to know more about this, please share this with them.
[1] Hat tip to Emmanuel Marin, who writes the blog Sortir de Paris à velo (Getting out of Paris on a bicycle).
[2] For example, when Elon Musk was trying to promote his Boring Company car tunnels in Los Angeles, his first idea for a corridor extended from near his home in Bel Air to near his office in Inglewood.
Back in April, I recorded two hour-long courses for Planetizen’s library of courses on urban planning topics. Planetizen has now polished these up with video effects and they’re ready for you to watch.
Both courses are relevant to audiences worldwide, although when dealing with the economic aspects of the topic I’m focused mostly on higher-wage countries (US, Canada, UK, EU, Japan, etc.) The language is US English but any English speaker should have no trouble following it.
Here’s a clip to give you a sense of the feel of it. The opening of the first course, and a unit on the geometric features of a city that make public transit efficient.
And here are some early reviews!
I hope you enjoy these, and will share them with others who might be interested.