A short personal anecdote: In 1996, I was working in public radio, and attended a public radio conference with a bunch of other radio nerds.

Everyone was freaking out about the telecommunications act. I didn’t understand it at first, but over lunch with a couple engineers …

https://twitter.com/yeen125/status/1864400055274230018

… they explained that most of the local bandwidth that provided communities with local news and programming was about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

It wiped local radio off the map.

In those days, same as today, the highest bidders were right-wing nut jobs.

The thing that most autonomous vehicle advocates get simply wrong, and seem to have created an ideological barrier against understanding, is the intractable relationship between mobility mode (car, bus, walk, bicycle) and land use (where homes are located, at what density). Autonomous vehicles, at root, are still just cars. There is talk about expanding to vans/jitneys — and this is, from a mobility perspective, by far the most interesting possible application.

But they still only work in cities.

US land use is designed to maximize sales of cars.

Lots of discourse about “the groups” so let me offer my perspective as a resident of Berkeley, California.

These protestors have been trying for the last several years to shut down a construction site for homeless and student housing.

The site is on university-owned land.

https://twitter.com/listeague/status/1857948070882980182

In January of 2023, these protestors destroyed $1 million worth of construction equipment.

Their argument was that the student housing and supportive housing for the homeless would cause gentrification and displacement (I am not making this up.) . berkeleyside.org/2023/01/09/uc-…

Thinking about how the fate of the US political system and economy is now converging on the insurance industry.

They don't care about the money you made selling mansions in fire and flood zones, or deadly "self-driving" cars to suckers.

They're just not gonna insure them. Abdication of governance from the left -- NIMBY Democrats forcing workers to live in flood and fire zones -- is matched and exceeded on the right, where it's illegal to even talk about climate change.

But the laws of physics have never even watched a single episode of Fox News.

For most of 2000’s/2010’s I worked with climate scientists/renewable energy experts. They were wildly different crews of humans.

But one thing clear early on — renewable energy experts said Florida would be a solar powerhouse.

Climate scientists said, there won’t be a Florida. In a world where climate change is real, the human geography of Florida is impossible.

Not only most population living at or even below sea level/storm surge; but Florida is a limestone shelf (highly absorbent rock), so there’s no way to protect inland areas from flooding.

My father was a post-doc nuclear physicist working on civilian nukes in the 1960s when nuclear power was in its heyday. The reasons for its demise have very little to do with the common narratives of "environmentalists blocked it," or whatever.

The industry slit its own throat.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1829182204074934599

There were two factors. A big one was, Cold War siphoned off a giant swath of nuclear engineers to make bombs and all the accoutrements. There was brain drain from civilian applications.

My father refused to make bombs. And the civilian nuclear sector was run by bean counters.

The thing to know about Democratic Party politics that nobody seems to have raised, so, I will:

The structure of the United States’ federal republic is an abomination. The Senate is a deeply evil institution, designed by horrible people to prevent democratic governance.

🧵 How does this relate to D-party politics? Well, in functioning democracies, voters elect parties that have platforms, then those parties work to enact those platforms.

And since real democracies — i.e., countries with no Senate (almost all of them) — allow parties to compete …

Something lost in the whole “but there’s no transit where I live!” is utterly massive cost violent drivers impose on society via under-insurance & very low maximums:

You could go outside, get hit by a violent driver, maimed for life, and not only would they go free but

https://twitter.com/dlknowles/status/1813644106167730584

… their insurance would only pay $50,000 of your million-dollar medical bills (and lifetime of medical care).

So now you’re also destitute and living off medicaid, which is, to an under-reported degree, one of the largest car industry subsidies in the United States.

A very simple rule of thumb is infrastructure cost scales by the linear foot, and the per capita cost decreases down with density.

IOW, over time, low-density car sprawl is a formula for bankruptcy — unless it can steal money from denser areas.

Which, in the U.S., it does.

https://twitter.com/devonzuegel/status/1812590740901372074

The suburban brain, how do it work? “Buildings don’t pay taxes” who wants to tell him

https://twitter.com/0r_ant0/status/1812820330488185023

Over the holiday weekend I met a woman who works for forest service in Nevada City, California. We got to chatting about fire risk, as one does.

She noted that her county -- like every other California county -- is still approving new homes in areas ... the forest service is very, very sure will burn, and that those new homes make it increasingly impossible to manage the forest for future fires:

To manage fire, you have to burn the forest. But if you put homes there, you can't. It's already nearly physically impossible ...

About a decade ago, while observing absurd obsequiousness to Elon Musk, I had a sense that we were entering an era of cults.

I’m completely convinced that’s true. But there’s another era that is headed for a collision with the cult era, and it’s the era of consequences — … as in, the era of insurance actuaries.

Politics can go really far in papering over deep structural problems with narrative and re-affirmation of cult values.

But what it can’t do: Pay for stuff with money it doesn’t actually have.

And so, here comes insurance industry.

Why we need fundamental reform:

Last night I attended a 3-hour transportation commission hearing about removing 5 parking spots from a public street to build a new protected bike lane next to a massive new infill housing project at a BART station.

There were ~ 45 people there. 15 of the attendees were staff for the city, for BART, and consultants.

15 of the people were NIMBYs who mistakenly think the parking “belongs to them.”

And 15 were people who are tired of driver violence and want protected bike lanes so we’re not assaulted or killed.

There’s this enduring myth about US cities that they’re crime-infested hellholes where murderers lurk around every dark corner, and what’s fucked up is …

It’s true. But the criminals are all drivers slaughtering people in the streets with their cars. latimes.com/california/sto…

https://twitter.com/peekskill_walks/status/1794787220047745346

Even worse: Many of the most violent offenders actually live in suburbs and speed through our cities, mowing people down and crashing into homes and day care centers and restaurants and businesses — and *fight all efforts to reduce these violent crimes.*

So when a suburbanist …

Something that occurs to me is how the prospects for future highway revenues -- really, revenues for all car infrastructure -- are increasingly dim.

US drivers, as a cohort, stridently oppose paying the cost of driving. The reasons for this seem somewhat contradictory ... 🧵 ... but can be largely traced, IMO, to a combination of oil industry-inspired political interference from the right, in form of opposition to user fees like gas, congestion, & mileage fees; the dishonesty of carmakers, which market freedom but sell unaffordable car dependence ...

LOL I read report, had a hunch about why Houston -- fastest-growing large city in US -- is broke.

My hunch was correct!! It's the actual cost of car sprawl coming due.

What's funny is, since the report was written by a right-wing/pro-sprawl org, they focus on "pension reform."

https://twitter.com/mayormcginn/status/1772604012405092842

Pension reform is important! But authors take pains to show pension liabilities as %, rather than actual costs.

And why is that?

Because Houston's net pension liability is less than 10% of sprawl liability. And Houston's conservatives love their massively-subsidized sprawl.

I’m presently on holiday and the first thing I notice when I leave US is, we really don’t have any idea what a civilized society looks or feels like, physically.

Most countries have infinitely more humanity in their streets.

We have banned it.

https://twitter.com/warrenjwells/status/1759089536997675289

And it’s not like bans on humans in our cities benefits anyone — aside from the car industry, which, compared to rest of world, utterly owns our government.

Shortest life spans, highest rate of violent driver injury and death, highest cost of living/transport in the OECD …

A bunch of years ago a very well-intentioned high school student convinced everyone he could sweep all plastic out of the ocean.

Oceanographers were quite frustrated by attention he got, because most of the plastic in the ocean is micron-scale.

And most of it is car tires.

https://twitter.com/jake_gotta/status/1752096870741266499

So we now have the phenomenon of well-intentioned environmentalists who drive everywhere they go, depositing plastic in ocean as they do, killing salmon and poisoning the food chain — and some of that driving is to attend protests to ban plastic bags.

You know. For the oceans.

[clears throat] "electric cars are good"

OK, with that out the way: An electric car is only good for the climate to the extent it is driven. That is, an old gasoline car that is only driven 50 miles per week will be lower-carbon than a new EV driven 50 miles per week. Reason is, carbon accounting on electric cars uses old CAFE standard -- how much pollution per mile?

And obviously, on per mile basis,* EVs have lower carbon pollution than gas cars.

*But the EV "break even" moment doesn't happen til EV has been driven news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…

Thing non-violent drivers have to understand is how many drivers are openly violent and even talk openly about how they would kill a pedestrian or bikling if they felt the human walking or biking caused them delay or inconvenience or even just annoyance.

As an uncarred human I can not, from the crosswalk or bike lane, tell if the driver headed for me is violent or non-violent. All I see are people on their phones while sitting behind the wheel of a car — so, mostly violent drivers.

And because so many drivers are violent I don’t have the luxury …

It is so weird to be an American Jew.

Most of us are “white,” but whiteness is provisional/geographic — in more Republican/white supremacist areas, we’re less white & subject to racist terror attacks.

Most of us are liberal/progressives who despise Bibi & Likudniks but also … … have family (including ourselves!) who are literally only alive because of Israel’s existence.

Most of us support democracy & a two-state solution and are horrified by right-wing end-times evangelicals in the GOP who use Zionism as thin cover for Taliban-style objectives …

With 150 million Americans threatened by deadly heat today/this week, here’s a fun climate thought experiment — I can’t remember who taught me this but it was during a forum on geoengineering at a COP.

So, we’re going to be doing tons of geoengineering. I’m personally opposed but the car industry is too powerful/too many humans think driving is a human right, and anyway, we’ve missed all our targets for 1.5 and 2 degrees and the next tranche of heat (2.5 or 3 degrees C, our trajectory) would likely make much of the human built environment non-viable.