yonahfreemark.com - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

1 million rides on Metro yesterday, highest day in 5 yrs! Thx you to our great customers & our awesome team. Some said transit & cities were done; well look now! Never bet against DC, the DMV & definitely don’t bet against @wmata. Proud to serve as America’s Metro System. #wmata

submitted 6 hours ago • 0 comments

Republicans passed and defended a law making it illegal to provide water to people waiting in line to vote.

submitted 10 hours ago • 64 comments

Nearly a third of U.S. patents rely directly on federal government supported research, and most of those patents are by corporations. h/t @jossfong.bsky.social par.nsf.gov/servlets/pur...

submitted 16 hours ago • 12 comments

Paris’ Place de la Concorde, currently a traffic sewer at the very heart of the city, will be transformed into a primarily pedestrian zone, with large landscaped areas, more than 100 new trees, & a direct stair down to the Seine River. www.lemonde.fr/economie/art...

submitted 1 day ago • 6 comments

Being snatched off the street for your opinions. I'll say it again. We are deciding, right now, whether the aspirations we hold for this country are finished. Whether we're going to let these hoodlums and grifters throw what's left of the American idea into the garbage for their own profit and gain.

submitted 2 days ago • 219 comments

With all the concern about what messaging app was used by our leaders, I'd love it if we also considered that we dropped bombs on a civilian apartment building and killed 53 people. Some number of whom were children. If another country did this to the United States, we'd call it a war crime.

submitted 2 days ago • 189 comments

The constant throat-clearing that "obviously there's a ton of fraud and waste in government, but this isn't the right approach" is infuriating Outside of military spending, there's minimal true waste...and what waste there is is often prescribed by Congress (ie Medicare not negotiating drug prices)

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

Unidentified men grabbing someone off the street and putting her in a car because she wrote an op-Ed. This as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.

submitted 2 days ago • 1942 comments

My research on the politics of social housing in the Paris region is published in this month’s @urbanstudiesonline.com This paper provides evidence that, when left wing parties win local councils, they implement developments with higher social housing shares. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

As Trump Admin attempts a massive cut to HUD, note that “Between 1978–83, HUD's budget authority was slashed by 72%… As HUD's programs & staff were cut to the bone, critically important housing protections disappeared... It is not a coincidence that homelessness exploded precisely during this era.”

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

My Kingdom and more for anyone to realize that awarding yourself a government contract is not a conflict of interest. It's corruption. When the bank teller takes the money out of the cash drawer and puts it in his pocket that's not a conflict of interest either.

submitted 3 days ago • 184 comments

The New York City Subway carries substantially more passengers on a daily basis than the entire US aviation system. And unlike the aviation system under this administration, this particular shithole manages to carry all those people without trains crashing & killing dozens of people.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Paris voted 66% in support of 500 new garden streets.

submitted 4 days ago • 7 comments

Paris voted 66% in support of 500 new garden streets.

submitted 4 days ago • 7 comments

Paris residents vote today on whether they support creating 500 new landscaped and pedestrianized “garden streets” and replace 10,000 street parking spaces. The city has already created 220 such streets. leparisien.fr/paris-75/500...

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

The Twin Cities’ $505 million Gold Line BRT opens today. It will run every 10 to 15 minutes on a mostly dedicated right of way, allowing speed and reliability. It will extend to downtown Minneapolis in 2027 along I-94.

submitted 6 days ago • 4 comments

This project will improve travel across the north side of the Dallas metro. But after spending $2.1 billion, you’d think you’d get more frequent service. Instead of an easy to use option people don’t have to use a schedule to ride, they’ll be waiting up to an hour to board a train.

submitted 6 days ago • 4 comments

Is Walk Score white score? Deconstructing a walkability algorithm in the context of racial capitalism with @annalivia.bsky.social & Frechette (Journal of Race, Ethnicity & the City) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Let's rethink walkability=proximity and place rankings amid racialized inequity

submitted 7 days ago • 4 comments

Railway milestone alert: signed contract for high-speed trains in #Canada. Today, Alto, a Via Rail subsidiary, signed contract with Cadence consortium to bring 300 km/h bullet trains, along 1000 kms of electrified line, to corridor between #Quebec City and #Toronto. www.newswire.ca/news-release...

submitted 7 days ago • 4 comments

“The MTA as a whole is averaging 448K more public transit riders per day this year…The MTA ridership growth since congestion pricing went into effect is almost 50% larger than the total ridership of America’s next-largest subway system.” bettercities.substack.com/p/congestion...

submitted 7 days ago • 15 comments

Just so this is clear, an unelected group of government employees blackmailed a private organization's security firm to help them break into that private organization's headquarters by threatening to terminate their other contracts. Giving Watergate vibes.

submitted 9 days ago • 47 comments

Facts: —Subway travel is far safer than car travel —More than 250 people died in car traffic-related incidents in 2024 in New York City, compared to 10 on the Subway gothamist.com/news/feeling... —Subway crime is declining rapidly in incidence www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/ne...

submitted 9 days ago • 4 comments

"The Chinese EV-maker shocked the world with a fast charger, while the U.S. is still figuring out if EVs are too woke." Uppercut of a dek from @liamdenning.bsky.social today www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

submitted 9 days ago • 37 comments

This isn't anti-DEI - it's retelling history as a story with only white men in it. The tale of the Navajo Code Talkers is essential to understanding the Allies' victory in WWII. Removing it because the people involved were non-white is segregationism.

submitted 11 days ago • 174 comments

New NBER paper finds that income growth—not housing supply elasticity—is the best predictor of housing prices & quantity: "Our results imply that housing supply constraints are quantitatively unimportant in explaining rising housing costs." www.nber.org/system/files... [Don't shoot the messenger.]

submitted 11 days ago • 15 comments

New NBER paper shows dramatic effects of NYC's congestion pricing in contrast with a set of control cities: A large reduction in travel times on roadways—average speeds increased by 15%—combined with a substantial reduction in vehicular emissions. www.nber.org/system/files...

submitted 11 days ago • 14 comments

Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute is back again the second part of his annual "Talking Headways" discussion.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Ranjani Srinivasan is an international student from India pursuing a doctorate in urban planning. She received a Fulbright scholarship. She was forced to flee to Canada to escape ICE, which was pursuing her for nonsense reasons. Columbia kicked her out of the doctoral program.

submitted 12 days ago • 3 comments

The US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) focuses on preventing & ending homelessness. Dissolving it (and devastating cuts to HUD, SAMHSA etc) will hamper efforts to address homelessness—as the these policies dramatically worsen an existing catastrophe. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

submitted 13 days ago • 2 comments

Trump signed an order this morning seeking to vastly reduce the scope of the CDFI Fund (among several other agencies). The CDFI Fund plays an essential role in US community development, particularly through the distribution of New Markets tax credits.

submitted 13 days ago • 3 comments

The Senate has passed the deeply flawed House R funding bill. It’s far from “clean”— but the single most important fact now is this: The CR has set in law full-year funding levels that make clear the Administration's impoundments & mass firings remain illegal. Period.

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

A wonderful tribute to Mumford, who wrote, “We cannot have an efficient form of our transport. system until we can envisage a better permanent structure for our cities… the 1st lesson we have to learn is that the city exists, not for the facile passage of cars, but for the care & culture of men.”

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

Congress’ funding package that the House GOP passed would not only force arbitrary funding cuts for DC (on revenues it raises itself!), but also could pass down cuts to Metro, forcing one of the nation’s best performing transit agencies to suddenly cut service & jobs.

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

More fun transit podcasting for those who can’t get enough!

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

New data tool launch today 🚨 @urbaninstitute.bsky.social's Federal Infrastructure site. It includes detailed information on funds from 110 programs across all states, counties & metro areas. Tool pinpoints the support that communities receive for transportation, housing, energy, water & broadband.

submitted 15 days ago • 3 comments

Great dashboard. You can easily see that the Philadelphia metro area receives almost 16% less in federal transit formula funding per-capita than peer metro Boston, most likely because PA is not on the Section 5340 "high-density" state list like MA and other NE states are

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

So much to explore in this new tool on fed infrastructure funding from @yonahfreemark.com and colleagues at @urbaninstitute.bsky.social. The ability to toggle between program and place is a huge bonus. 🚨Includes a lot of IRA and IIJA programs and helps paint of picture of what's at stake with cuts

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments