noahpinion.blog

The death of Market Street

Cars were subtracted, but pedestrians weren't added. The direct cost of this policy is pretty obvious. When people can't park in a parking garage on Market, and when Uber and Lyft can't pick people up and drop people off on the street, it makes businesses on the street less attractive to visit.

whyisthisinteresting

The Dubai Creek Edition

In 1958, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed, then Ruler of Dubai, borrowed around a half a million dollars from the Emir of Kuwait to dredge the creek. Dubai had no meaningful oil wealth at the time. What Sheikh Rashid had was a conviction that trade would define the city, and that the creek needed to be deep enough for modern ships.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 109

The Blue Line is running. The trains arrive. The system works. But the people maintaining it are still flown in from China, the contract that keeps it running is approaching expiration, and there is no public maintenance budget.

notboring.co

Expanding the Radius of Daily Life

It is an anthropological invariant rooted in territorial behavior that when humans access a faster mode of transportation, they use it to travel further instead of traveling less. We are born to spread. We like to commute about 30 minutes each way, or about an hour a day. Give us a faster vehicle, and we don't pocket all the time we save. We spend it to reach more of the map.

noahpinion.blog

Will Americans want more housing if it looks prettier?

While the paper by [ Broockman, Elmendorf, and Kalla (2026) ] provides pretty good evidence that ordinary people's aesthetic objections to bad, very unfit-to-context buildings affect their support for development (to the extent they care about anything development-related)…no one has shown that any specific set [of] design standards would materially improve public support for development, apart from pretty obvious stuff like "don't put up new buildings in low-density areas that are much taller than their neighbors")