Mark R. Brown, AICP, CNU

There are about 30 other U.S. cities that need to do what Seattle did.

My recent Substack piece: Why Piecemeal Bike Lanes Fail (And How to Build a Real Network Fast). Link in reply.

Léon Krier, a Luxembourgish architect, understood the flaws of American cities better than American city planners.

There is no future for urbanism in America, zero, if we don’t overcome the partisan divide in enforcing public safety. No drugs, no encampments, no vandalism, no theft sprees, no fencing, no vagrancy. Fail at that, and welcome the new urban flight.

America was once a global leader in city planning: we planning out thousands of street grids and civic centers, building the world's largest transit and park networks, inventing new genres of architecture, etc. Now we can barely install a park bench for less than six figures.

@StephenFleming 98% of people are descendants of serfs.

I’m eavesdropping on two middle-aged couples talking at the local breakfast spot. Good news: they’re talking about moon bases and Mars missions. Artemis definitely broke through into civilian consciousness. Bad news: the levels of ignorance and confident misunderstanding are terrifying. (1) Artemis never left the Earth’s atmosphere. (2) If they had, the radiation would have killed them. (3) Moon landings are fine, but bases are silly, since humans can’t live on the Moon. (4) A trip to Mars would take years in transit. (5) Elon Musk has cancelled his plans for a Mars mission. And on and on… And of course, from one of the women, (6) we should be spending all this money here on Earth. I’m keeping my mouth shut. With difficulty.

More money for NASA. Less money for war.

ARTEMIS II SPLASHDOWN. WELCOME BACK TO EARTH!

@YIMBYLAND Cool.

What if we made Social Media Blue Laws? Blue Laws already ban liquor stores from operating on Sundays in tons of states. What if we did the same for Social Media? Imagine if all the social media apps were closed on Sundays. No more temptation of the small screen... just kids and families spending time with each other, going to church, seeing grandparents, or simply read books. Could be cool?

@megha_lilly They hate air conditioning.

My recent Substack piece: Brightline Passenger Rail Is Booming While America Still Has No Real Alternative to $4 Gas and Horrifically Expensive Domestic Flights (link in reply)

@aaron_lubeck Asheville, too.

No. Charleston is great because we didn't F up reconstruction. When planners were bulldozing much of historic America in the name of “progress”, Charleston was too poor to “reinvent itself”. And that's what saved it. Charleston’s lesson is that poverty is a great friend of preservation.

St. Louis, before they demolished entire neighborhoods for highways and the Arch.

@andrewchen Yea, this won't happen.

prediction: we'll soon view coding the way we view using spreadsheets today - a commonplace skill that every white collar worker is expected to have. Knowing how to code will sit alongside email, making slides, word processing, etc etc. It'll be <18 months before this is widespread in every job description Customer-facing employees will code as well as sell/market/support, so that they convert their domain expertise into repeatable workflows and software. We'll have an explosion of internal bespoke apps. But to complement all of this coding happening at the edges, we'll also have centrally expert teams of agentic coders who build infrastructure, make it secure/scalable, and create canonical software. These central teams will help scale agentic engineering. There's a spreadsheet metaphor here too -- yes, if you are an expert at spreadsheets, you write macros, build huge models, etc., we'll put you in a group of your own. It's called Finance. :) We'll have the same central teams to help manage the widespread use of coding tools throughout the org. You might ask, won't this be a mess? What happens in a world where everyone has many many variations of bespoke software? (It's already happening) Maybe! But I think it'll be fine, in the same way that it's fine to make a copy of a spreadsheet or deck. Making it easy to fork makes it easy to participate. But you might want an "official" forecast maintained by an official finance person, in the same way that there will be variations of canonical and bespoke software excited for the Gdrive of many many forks of disposable apps made and shared by my co-workers!!! 😂

Mexico City is adding a 3rd & 4th urban gondola lines which will expand it to more than 40 stations. Like Paris, Mexico City has shown that urban gondolas can be fast, cost-effective urban transit.

@coloradan29 No.

@CompletedStreet Its almost half, which is too much. Cities and states should fully find their own internal systems. Fed money should only be used for interstate infrastructure or those that benefit regions (like dams, nuke plants, & electrical grid).

@coloradan29 You do realize fed grants fund almost every transit system in the U.S., right?

@CompletedStreet The fed govt is not responsible for and doesn't fund a bus route in your city.

@EFF Your explanation is incoherent.

When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. EFF takes on big fights, and we win by putting our time, skills, and members’ support where they will have the most impact. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. eff.org/deeplinks/2026… (5/5)

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. 🧵(1/5)

Tri-Rail and Metrorail/Metrobus reported increased ridership last Saturday as @InterMiamiCF played their first match at Nu Stadium 🏟️