Data scientist, MCB3 member, and writer of the NYCuriosity Substack. Any opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not represent MCB3.
New York, NY
Joined January 2014
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1/ Every law the NYC Council passes is public. Reading them means digging through Legistar's PDFs and Word files. So I built trackers that read every local law since 2014 for you, and they now include a third: the powers the Council gives city agencies. nycuriosity.com/p/i-built-to…
1/ Every year NYC's 59 community boards send City Hall a list of neighborhood needs, and the answers land in separate PDFs that board members have to match back by hand. Henry Grunzweig and I wrote in Searchlight about fixing it in one evening: searchlight.citizensunion.or…
4/ A board could never justify a software contract for this when a competitive city procurement took a median of 387 days in FY2025. We propose a faster path to test new tools, more capacity at OTI to help every agency, and civil service titles that can hire engineers.
5/ If you're a builder with a civic problem, a public servant curious about these tools, or a funder, we'd love to hear from you: statecapacityecosystem.com/ Any opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not represent the views of Manhattan Community Board 3.
Tal G. Roded retweeted
Making local government more transparent and efficient via AI; @TalR24 and the State Capacity Ecosystem make the case for civic hackathons offering a faster, cheaper roadmap for municipal innovation.
searchlight.citizensunion.or…
1/ NYC traffic deaths hit a record low in 2025, but pedestrian deaths have barely moved. I dug into crash data and 391 community board votes to see why the fixes that work spread so slowly. nycuriosity.com/p/nyc-knows-…
5/ Money and staff are the other bottleneck. In 2025, DOT built 18.2 of the 50 protected bike lane miles the Streets Plan requires, and 20.8 of 30 bus lane miles.
ALT DOT hit none of Local Law 195's four annual minimums in 2025, building 18.2 of 50 required protected bike lane miles and 20.8 of 30 bus lane miles.
6/ Search what your own community board has said about street safety in the Block Party resolutions archive: blockparty.studio/
We can wait for AI’s effect on the labor markets to become truly disruptive, or we can be proactive and stop the issue before it becomes apparent.
I’ve written with @VitalCityNYC on strategies the city should pursue to attract diverse jobs and lead on AI: vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-job-qua…
1/ Community boards are the most local level of NYC government, and they still run on email chains and stacks of PDFs. I sit on one. At our second State Capacity AI Hackathon, 80+ people spent two hours building fixes. Recap: substack.statecapacityecosys…
3/ The second theme: helping New Yorkers see that the city hears them. Hearts and Minds sets local data, like SNAP losses under H.R. 1, next to how people react online. Another team routes every TikTok asking the mayor for help to the right agency as a trackable item.
ALT Hearts and Minds, a hackathon prototype: a radar of Medicaid pain points ranked by people affected and online mentions (sample data)
No fall weekend is complete without a walk to the East Village Apollo Bagels and dog watching at Tompkins Square Park
Picture I took during my weekly routine last autumn:
Announcing Bagel-Bench: the definitive guide to NYC bagels.
Every Friday for the past 2 years, we’ve ordered bagels for the whole @ExtendHQ team. 1000s of bagels later, we’re publishing our findings:
S-tier: Apollo and Bagel & Schmear are SOTA, pushing the frontier on the taste × reliability Pareto curve. two of NYC’s leading applied bagel labs
A-tier: Brooklyn Bagel, NYC Bagel & Coffee House, and Murray’s are strong production-ready alternatives. The gap to the frontier is real, but we remain bullish.
B-tier: solid baselines, but we’d like to see more bagel R&D
C-tier: these shops have impressive distribution. We’d love to see that same investment in the core model
D-tier: significant work to do before we’d recommend consumption
like all benchmarks, this one is biased. unlike most benchmarks, we’re admitting it upfront.
what bagel should we eval next?
1/ Every NYC law is public. Reading them is another story: PDFs, jargon, and links to more links. So I built trackers that read every Council law since 2014 for you. Here is the one-minute version.
3/ Every duty, power and fiscal estimate the Council has handed city agencies since 2014: data.nycuriosity.com/civic_r…
