So late last week there was this bit of The Discourse about ... production amenities vs. consumption amenities as drivers of urban growth and decline. Somehow this turned into a debate about Kendall Square, Cambridge, and I said that people should look at old Sanborn maps. I brought that up largely because I had already done so, more than a decade ago, and still had the downloads of old low-quality black-and-white scans from a commercial database publisher in my home directory.

I'm sure I could read a business review article about this, but why does the US now have so few economically significant family-owned firms? After Koch, Johnson Wax, and Mars I'm not sure I could name another. There's been a bit of writing in recent years claiming to have identified "America's Mittelstand" but those small, family-owned manufacturing firms have a far greater role in Germany's economy than their purported analogues in the US.

Apparently I am a masochist or something, because I went and read nearly the entire transportation bond bill that passed the state senate today. Sort of. Let me explain the confusing procedure by which we got here… There were *two* transportation bond bills, H.4547 in the House and S.2813 in the Senate. This is because, while the transportation committee is a joint committee, the finance committees are separate, so each body was proceeding on its own track.

Had to spend the last hour or so writing additional comments to the #MBTA board (with a copy to my state rep). Meeting recap tk in a few minutes. Ok, here we are with the recap of today's #MBTA board meeting. Absent today were vice-chair @MonicaTibbitsN and director @BrianLang123; present were chair Aiello, directors Kornegay and @BrianShortsleev, and transportation secretary @Steph_Pollack.

Ok, so on with the recap of today's incredibly long (five hours!) #MBTA board meeting. As always, these are done from my handwritten notes taken at the meeting, so if I missed someone's name, sorry, them's the breaks. Directors @BrianLang123 and @BrianShortsleev were absent to start the meeting; Lang joined at 2pm. Present for the whole meeting were chairman Aiello, vice-chair @MonicaTibbitsN, director Kornegay, and secretary @Steph_Pollack.

Hey all, I went to the @MBTA board meeting today, and now that I'm home and I've eaten it's time to recap a busy meeting. The start time was shifted early for some reason, but the meeting ended at 2p without going into executive session. Director Kornegay was absent. In the public comment period, I was up first, and made some pointed remarks about catenary-phobia on the part of Sec. Pollack, but moved on quickly to a bigger point (see my thread from this weekend) about bus corridors that deserve better-than-bus service models.

And once again it's Monday, and I'm recapping today's @MBTA board meeting rather than riding my bike trainer like I should be doing, because I can't do both and still get to bed at a reasonable hour. This meeting started at the usual time of 12 noon. Today's meeting agenda was clearly made available to electeds before the public, since word that the Red-Blue Connector would be discussed was out days before the agenda was released to us plebes. Unusually for the first Monday of a month, there was a public comment period.

Well, I should be getting ready to do a trainer ride this evening, but I went to the @MBTA board meeting this morning, so I'm going to spend time I should be exercising writing this recap instead. There were two meetings earlier this month I did not attend for lack of interest. This is the first meeting with a full board since the appointment of former director @spoftak to be the new MBTA general manager. Gov. Baker secretly appointed Chrystal Kornegay, executive director of MassHousing, to the board on Friday, and she was formally introduced today.

Hey, guess what? It's time for my weekly summary of the @MBTA FMCB meeting. No meeting the next two Mondays because of the holidays, and the meeting was jam-packed. Scheduled start time was 11:00 but the @MassDOT Capital Programs Committee didn't release the room until 11:15ish. I have nine pages of notes in addition to the written version of my own comments. The meeting started with two items pushed up on the schedule ahead of the public comments. First up was a retirement citation for the MassDOT highway division's chief snow and ice engineer.

After a good night's sleep, time to find out if I can read the notes I made yesterday while watching the video of the joint MassDOT/FMCB meeting from yesterday. Let's start with the public comment period. Normally these meetings have two, but the MassDOT meeting ran long so the FMCB never had its own independent session and comment period.

As promised, I'm going to summarize my observations from today's Rail Vision Advisory Committee meeting. First, a few notes of the oddness of the process. It's a very big committee, and the @MBTA web site says nothing about its membership other than that they "represent diverse perspectives". I have no idea who is on it or why, but I noted one side of the large rectangle was all advocacy groups, and on the far side, politicians.