congestionpricing-othy 🚊🛫🏳️‍🌈

apparently it’s time for a #newprofilepic

Longest summer season until 2037. Quirk of the calendar means earliest Memorial Day and latest Labor day possible. 106 days of the summer season. Last year is was 99 days.

@notchrisvolpe You should sign up for the weekender email so the track work doesn’t come as a surprise to you and you are aware of the modified schedules

@TimmyShea Nowhere in the MTA’s published schedules for service are there 20 min gaps for A trains in the middle of the day at any Manhattan stations. And if they did reduce service like that without publishing new schedules, it should be an even bigger scandal. mta.info/schedules/subw…

The MTA is running anywhere from 20-40% less service than is scheduled and if Kathy Hochul knew what was good for her she’d declare an emergency, fire Janno Lieber, and scape goat him. This shit is unacceptable and it will be headlines in a few weeks during the World Cup.

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

@notchrisvolpe Yes but that is scheduled service

@TimmyShea The reality of subway service being rendered by the MTA pretty much every weekend the past few months.

The parades of the 1976 Bicentennial

This is truly one of the most annoying things about soccer/football, this would be a vast improvement to the experience

The lesson from the LIRR strike is ... we are going to need a bigger LIRR strike. nypost.com/2026/05/20/opi…

THE FEDS PICKED A DESIGN FOR PENN STATION, PLAN WON'T FORCE MSG TO MOVE gothamist.com/news/feds-pick…

@aquablvd Oh hi 👋

every great hook up i’ve had has been with a man with a slightly questionable hairline

@thattomjohnson New York's LIRR predates the standardization of the word "railroad." It's that old. Metro North on the other hand, has only existed in its modern form since the early 80s, well within the lifetime of many of their own customers.

One of the funnest stories I’ve done at @AP: barely a month into the job in 2014, my editor sends me racing to Grand Central at rush hour to ride one of Metro-North’s last bar car trains. Strangers welcomed me in. Cheers to them and stories like that. yahoo.com/news/bar-cars-…

In some very real sense, Ozempic was invented in 1990. Pfizer ran the human trials and just never published them. They showed it lowered blood glucose in diabetics, slowed gastric emptying, and killed hunger; the same 3 things that make Ozempic work today. The joint venture agreement said internal data stayed internal, and that was that. Pfizer killed the program in 1991. The reasoning, as far as I can tell, was that nobody would ever want an injectable diabetes drug besides insulin. So, the license went back to the hospital in Boston that held the patents. Novo picked it up in 1992 and spent the next two decades building liraglutide, then semaglutide. It's insane that data sat in a filing cabinet for 30+ years. I only know this because Jeffrey Flier, one of the Harvard scientists in the room, finally wrote it up. He's in his late 70s and didn't want the history to die with him. This makes you wonder what else is in those filing cabinets. Ozempic could've existed 27 years ago.

I’ve never felt more gaslit. I’m from Long Island. I’ve taken the LIRR my whole life. I’ve never once heard a single person pronounce it “lurr,” ever

@GovKathyHochul @MTA This was way too quick ugh

Tonight, the @MTA reached a fair deal with the five LIRR unions that delivers raises for workers while protecting riders and taxpayers. I’m pleased to announce that phased LIRR service will resume beginning tomorrow at noon.

A Metro-North strike in 1983 lasted six weeks and is a key reason Metro-North is cheaper to run.

The LIRR has some of the highest operating costs among US commuter rails, and the current strike centers on one key reason: work rules dating back to the steam era. Modernizing these agreements is critical to expanding service and ensuring fiscal stability. ETA's analysis:

168 of LIRR's hourly workers last year got paid more than Gov. Kathy Hochul's $250,000 salary. 25 got over $300,000.

The LIRR strike makes for interesting coalitions and is why I love studying and teaching NYC: Hard-red suburban Republicans and urban socialists in favor of the strike—and liberal-left urbanists, transit experts, and the conservative Manhattan Institute against it. Only in NYC!

oh my god, this is unbelievable: the striking LIRR worker complaining that Hochul “has money for everything except our salaries” LITERALLY MADE MORE MONEY THAN HOCHUL DID LAST YEAR