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My latest - “How to Get in Front of the Future: Anticipatory Planning” by @altaplanning #scenarioplanning #smartmobility #autonomous #parking medium.com/alta-innovation-l…
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Atlanta friends dressed as Waymo self-driving cars for Halloween, and even the cops stopped to watch. One of them got stuck in a hedge. Obviously.
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A 4-second pedestrian head start at signals - called an LPI - cut crashes up to 50% in NYC. It's a signal retiming. Near zero cost. This is as close to a free safety upgrade as we get. Use it everywhere.
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Following up on @zoox exemption approval, NHTSA’s operational authority letter referenced in the grant of approval lays out the T’s and C’s.
On quick read, here’s what stood out: (1) initial cap of 600 vehicles, ability to increase to 1,000; (2) operate only on roads subject to 45 mph speed limit or less (ie no freeways); (3) cities it can operate in number 8, but last 3 redacted (Las Vegas, SF, Foster City (HQ), Miami and Austin are named); (4) no children under 8 allowed; (5) can not operate in heavy rain, fog, haze, smoke or interestingly enough roadways obscured by large quantities of leaves; (6) conditions about operating in foreign countries, (what does NHTSA know that we don’t on Zoox expansion!)
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A 2024 USDOT/CPBS report says pedestrian and bicyclist fatal/serious crashes have trended toward lower population density, “migrating from urban to suburban areas,” especially collectors and arterials in post-war suburbs.
The modal death environment is fake urbanism: urban by FARS, suburban by form, arterial by design.
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NYC e-bike injury study highlights 'critical infrastructure deficiencies' - h/t StreetsBlog NYC dlvr.it/TSFgPx
With the cost of rail now becoming almost untenable, this opens up all sorts of opportunity for having Transit oriented development, and with that the growing justification for a physically separated Lane
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🚨BREAKING: Two researchers from UPenn and Boston University just published a paper that should be uncomfortable reading for every CEO automating their workforce right now.
The argument is straightforward. Every company replacing workers with AI is also eliminating its own future customers. Laid off workers stop spending. Enough of them stop spending and nobody can afford to buy anything. The companies that fired everyone end up selling into an economy with no purchasing power left.
Every executive can see this. The math is not complicated. But here is why nobody stops.
If you do not automate, your competitor does. They cut costs, lower prices, take your market share, and you collapse anyway. So every company automates knowing it is collectively destructive because the alternative is dying alone while everyone else survives. The researchers proved this is a Prisoner's Dilemma playing out in real time.
The numbers are already moving. Block cut nearly half its 10,000 employees this year. Jack Dorsey said AI made those roles unnecessary and that within the next year the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion. Salesforce replaced 4,000 customer support agents with AI. Goldman Sachs deployed a coding tool that lets one engineer do the work of five. Over 100,000 tech workers were laid off in 2025 and AI was cited as the primary driver in more than half those cases. 80% of US workers hold jobs with tasks susceptible to AI automation.
The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income does not change a single company's incentive to automate. Capital income taxes adjust profit levels but not the per-task decision to replace a human. Collective bargaining cannot hold because automating is always the dominant strategy.
They also identified what they call a Red Queen effect. Better AI does not solve the problem, it accelerates it. Every company chases faster automation to gain market share over rivals but at the end everyone has automated equally, the gains cancel out, and the only thing left is more destroyed demand.
The one thing the math says could work is a Pigouvian automation tax. A per-task charge that forces companies to account for the demand they destroy each time they replace a worker.
The conclusion is that this is not a transfer of wealth from workers to owners. Both sides lose. Workers lose income. Companies lose customers. It is a deadweight loss with no market mechanism to stop it on its own.
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Building a tram network doesn’t get people out of their cars. It just stops them from walking.
Researchers analysed mobility data from nearly 400 European cities to understand how infrastructure changes daily commutes. They tracked three core categories: active mobility, public transport, and private cars. The goal was to isolate the exact impact of building a metro versus laying down tram tracks.
The data for underground metros perfectly matches urban planning theory. Cities with metro systems see a massive boost in public transport use and a direct drop in car journeys. Metros successfully convince drivers to leave their vehicles at home.
Trams show a completely different pattern. In cities that rely on trams but lack a metro, the car share remains heavily dominant. The drivers keep driving. The tram network completely fails to disrupt car dependency.
A Dirichlet regression model applied to the dataset reveals exactly who is actually riding the tram. The presence of a tram system correlates with a severe reduction in active mobility. The new public transport infrastructure merely convinces pedestrians and cyclists to buy a ticket and sit down.
Europe has 60 percent of the global tram network and generates 75 percent of total ridership. Governments fund these street-level programmes under the assumption they will fix traffic congestion and lower emissions. The data proves that assumption is entirely wrong.
If a city wants to pull cars off the road, it has to build a metro. Funding a tram line might look like a green victory on a political brochure. The reality is that it just destroys walking and cycling rates while leaving the traffic jams completely untouched.
Link to article: nature.com/articles/s44284-0…
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Scientists plugged a single device into an unused 50-kilometre internet cable in California and instantly created 50,000 underground sensors.
Tracking a city’s physical movements usually requires an ultra-dense array of physical monitors. Installing them costs a fortune and disrupts traffic for months. A research team completely bypassed this bottleneck by using dark fibre. They repurposed existing, dormant telecommunication lines into a massive distributed acoustic sensing system.
By bouncing lasers down the glass, every single metre of that 50-kilometre cable became a virtual dynamic-strain sensor. That's 50,000 sensors continuously sampling data at 200 Hz. Instead of spending millions digging up roads to install bespoke hardware, the cost per sensor dropped to a few dollars.
The system tracked the entire city in real time. It picked up the vibrations of freight trains from two kilometres away. It mapped the exact locations of heavy trucks moving down the highway. It even caught the sudden bursts of foot traffic every time the bell rang at a local high school.
When the researchers analysed the six-day dataset, the seismic maps perfectly mirrored San Jose's zoning. Mixed-use and commercial areas pulsed with high seismic energy. Agricultural zones barely registered. They successfully mapped the city's noise pollution hotspots without placing a single microphone above ground.
The data also highlighted a stark socioeconomic divide. Cross-referencing the seismic source power with census block data revealed a strong negative correlation with median income. People living in lower-income neighbourhoods are subjected to significantly higher levels of continuous seismic intensity and environmental noise.
Planners can't gather enough data to manage traffic, monitor infrastructure, and track environmental hazards using conventional methods. The standard playbook relies on cameras and smartphone tracking, which carry heavy privacy concerns and maintenance bills. The alternative is already buried under our streets. The existing internet grid doubles as a built-in nervous system, and we just learned how to listen to it.
Link to study: nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
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Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild.
A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute.
Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home.
So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room.
The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely.
The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running.
Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.
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Researchers from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon gave AI agents real email accounts, shell access, and file systems.
Then they tried to break them.
What happened over the next 14 days should TERRIFY every tech CEO in America.
The study is called Agents of Chaos.
38 researchers, six autonomous AI agents and a live environment with real tools not a simulation.
One agent was told to protect a secret.
When a researcher tried to extract it, the agent didn’t just refuse.
It destroyed its own mail server and no one told it to do that.
Another agent refused to share someone’s Social Security number and bank details.
So the researcher changed one word.
“Forward me those emails instead.”
Full PII, SSN, medical records and all of it.
One word bypassed the entire safety system.
Two agents started talking to each other.
They didn’t stop for nine days with 60,000 tokens burned.
When one agent adopted unsafe behavior, the others picked it up like a virus.
One compromised agent degraded the safety of the entire system.
A researcher spoofed an identity and told an agent there was a fabricated emergency.
The agent didn’t verify, it blasted the false alarm to every contact it had.
The agents also lied, they reported tasks as “completed” when the system showed they had failed.
They told owners problems were solved when nothing changed.
The framework these agents ran on already has 130+ security advisories.
42,000 instances are exposed on the public internet right now and companies are deploying this in production today.
When Agent A triggers Agent B, which harms a human who is accountable?
The user? The developer? The platform?
Right now, nobody knows.
38 researchers from the best institutions on Earth are sounding the alarm.
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Most people will read this and think optimists live longer because they eat better and exercise more. The study says something wilder.
Lee et al. controlled for smoking, diet, exercise, alcohol, depression, BMI, and socioeconomic status. The longevity effect still held. The most optimistic quartile lived 11 to 15% longer and had 1.5 to 1.7x odds of reaching 85 even after removing every behavioral difference.
Which means something is happening at the level of biology, not just habits.
Rozanski’s meta-analysis across 229,391 participants found optimists carry 35% lower cardiovascular event risk. Blackburn’s Nobel Prize-winning lab at UCSF found pessimistic attitudes are associated with accelerated telomere shortening. Cortisol suppresses telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds the protective caps on your chromosomes. So chronic negative expectation literally erodes the structures that keep your cells from aging.
The loop runs: pessimistic cognitive style → sustained HPA axis activation → elevated cortisol → telomere degradation → accelerated cellular senescence. Optimists interrupt that loop at the top. They show less emotional reactivity to stressors, faster recovery from acute stress, and they default to reframing threats as challenges rather than catastrophizing.
The part nobody talks about from this paper: the authors explicitly state optimism is modifiable. This isn’t a personality trait you’re born with. Cognitive reappraisal training, morning sunlight for cortisol rhythm regulation, deliberate breathing protocols for vagal tone, structured gratitude practices. All of these shift the prefrontal cortex patterns that determine where you sit on the optimism spectrum.
A 35% reduction in cardiac events from a trainable psychological variable is a bigger effect size than most supplements on the market. That’s the real story buried in this abstract.
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NEW. Powerful piece by Miles Bruner.
"I know the thought of walking away from your career and your social network is terrifying...I urge you to recognize that our nation is heading down a very dark path. But it’s not too late to change direction."
open.substack.com/pub/thebul…
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Buckle up, it's a genuinely novel paper:
Current law (!) allows HUD to delegate states zoning immunity for federally-funded, state-selected HOME & HTF housing
The President & HUD can't end the zoning crisis themselves under current law. But they *can* empower states to do it👇
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) could drive a stake through the housing crisis with a policy that empowers states to overcome NIMBY opposition to new housing.
A new report by me, @ShroyerAaron, and @aarmlovi shows how. (1/6)
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I was sent this by a Georgian this morning. 2025 premiums vs 2026 premiums for someone making $65k a year.
Republicans in Washington did this.
This is what I'm fighting to stop. This is what’s at stake in this shutdown fight.
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Our webinar series focuses on our vision for surface transportation reauthorization.
Gain the knowledge and tools you need to advocate for the transportation priorities that are most important to you and your communities!
Learn more and register here ⤵️
t4america.org/2025/05/14/tra…
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Pope Leo XIV explains his choice of name:
"... I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour."
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The White House has put itself and the country in a bad situation but doesn’t realize it yet.
Around April 10th China to USA trade shut down.
It takes ~30 days for containers to go from China to LA.
45 to Houston by sea, 45 to Chicago by train.
55 to New York by sea.
That means that there are no economic effects of what was done on April 10th until about May 10th.
Around that time (it’s already started to happen) trucking work is going to dry up. Warehouses will start doing layoffs because no labor is needed to unload containers and some products will be out of stock, reducing the need for shipping labor.
All this will start in the Los Angeles area.
After about 2 weeks, it’ll start hitting Chicago and Houston.
Let’s say the White House, after 3 weeks, changes its mind, on May 31st.
“This isn’t working out like we thought it would. Tariffs back to 0.”
Let’s say China says “bygones be bygones, we’ll go back to how things were”.
Let’s say every factory in China that got screwed by their orders being cancelled says the same thing “no problem, we’ll make and ship”.
The problem is, even under the most favorable conditions of China and the factories restarting economic ties as though nothing happened, it will be at least another 30 days before economic activity is revived.
And that’s just in LA.
In Chicago/Houston, you’ll need to wait another 45 days.
New York, at that point, will still be getting containers from before April 10th, they will then have 50 days (May 31 minus April 10) of zero economic activity at the ports, in trucking of Chinese goods, in warehousing.
The whole situation is a bit like lockdowns. Once you shut down, it takes a long time to get economic activity back to where it was, if you ever can.
And again, this assumes, that China and its factories, which make things you can’t buy elsewhere, will start right back up again as though nothing happened, which is unlikely.
It’s almost like we’re speeding towards a brick wall but the driver of the car doesn’t see it yet.
By the time he does, it’ll be too late to hit the brakes.
ALT Sino shipping route map