Ryan Johnson

The biggest reason we don’t have more walkable neighborhoods is because they are illegal youtu.be/4UAZMEpOKTI?si…

New-urbanismmaxxing at @culdesac after getting a front-row look at @ryanmjohnson’s vision for walkable cities.@JoinEdgeCity. The future has less parking lots

@CjgbVictoria @neevefrat What about autonomous buses?

@neevefrat @ryanmjohnson Autonomous vehicles will reduce parking requirements but may increase congestion.

I spent 24 hours inside America's newest car-free neighborhood, with the man who designed it. @ryanmjohnson It made me realize how broken everywhere else actually is – and how American cities are about to change forever. What I learned is that autonomous cars will reduce the need for the majority of parking. When you remove parking lots and garages from a neighborhood, you free up an enormous amount of land. That land can become courtyards, gardens, restaurants, and shops all within walking distance of every front door. The company that made this town, Culdesac built an entire neighborhood in Tempe, Arizona on this idea. And the result is something that could be the blueprint for how we design our neighborhoods once AVs become fully adopted. The insight is simple: parking doesn't just take up space, it kills the energy of a place. Remove it and you get density, walkability, and community back. Now they're scaling it. More cities, more neighborhoods, a different vision for how Americans live. Most people think walkable cities are a European thing — too old, too dense, impossible to replicate here. Culdesac is proving that's wrong, one neighborhood at a time and giving us insight into how we can develop neighborhoods for AV age. @culdesac

Neev is a rising star futurist. Watch this space

Watch @neevefrat, a rising star futurist videographer youtube.com/watch?v=2iLOKj…

@rachbelaid @supermemory You two should meet

I guess that I have a new tool to try this weekend!!! Congratulations to the @supermemory team! It’s also open source!

@PrimalNick @aaron_epstein @charliewarren Excited about this product and awesome that you are working with Aaron

The accountability and push of YC brought me back for a second time. Extremely blessed to be working with @aaron_epstein and @charliewarren!

Waze rated Utrecht as the best city in the world to DRIVE in

AI is going to have a profound impact on real estate.

AV Ridehail and its second order effects coming out of nowhere for the urbanists

@TheRideshareGuy I like this too

Waymo is now testing a new ‘Snooze Fee’ that lets riders delay pickup. Spotted this feature on Saturday night in LA. Waymo let me pay $2.50 to delay pickup by 2 minutes instead of getting hit with a $4.99 cancellation/no show fee. At first glance it seems minor, but I think it actually says a lot about their bigger priorities 👀 As Waymo scales, fleet utilization becomes more important, and this could be an early sign they’re already assigning meaningful economic value to idle vehicle time. The math was interesting too: 💸 My trip: $34.45 for 7.64 miles over 18 min (~$1.91/minute) ⏰ Snooze fee: $2.50 for 2 extra minutes (~$1.25/minute) + no extra miles on the vehicle Also interesting: Waymo’s cancellation fee is $4.99, nearly double the cost of extending pickup by 2 min. Which suggests they may not actually want riders missing trips and would rather preserve an existing ride for a smaller fee vs. rematching the vehicle later 🤔 What do you think of this feature? Would you pay $2.50 for 2 extra min? 😂

Lectric has brought back Juiced. Here’s the new Scrambler

@prabinjoel @brezina Doing this with cities actively fighting it is impressive.

@brezina @ryanmjohnson Most of the $1B will get converted at IPO. If the listing goes well, most of the debt will be either converted or paid back.

Micromobility has been in the underhyped part of its cycle

@SukritGanesh And if cities want to get better they should legalize this, but without the parking

If California wants to become affordable, it needs to copy-paste tens of thousands of exactly this type of apartment building: 6 stories with ground-floor parking; 2 units per floor (either two 2-beds + den or one 1-bed and one 3-bed); single stair and elevator; 7,000 sq ft lot.

@floralapartment They already are. And everyone will realize it

@ryanmjohnson That they are a blight?

In 10 years we’ll look at parking garages in the middle of cities the same way we look at data centers now

@TurnerNovak And student housing is somehow still August 1

One of the most insane things I’ve ever come across: Up until World War II, the majority of renters in NYC all moved at the same time on May 1st at 9am. This is because (almost) every housing lease in NYC expired on the same day. This goes back to an old Dutch tradition where every contract had an end date of May 1st. This was carried over when Dutch settlers immigrated to the US. And in 1820, the state of New York actually passed a law mandating that any housing contract without a specified term ended on May 1st. Many housing leases were just oral / handshake agreements and not actually written down, so they all had this same end date. At the height of Moving Day in the early 1900’s, it was estimated that over a million people in NYC all changed their residences at the same time. For context, NYC’s population was 1.5m in 1890 and 7.4m in 1940. Every year on May 1st, tens of thousands of farmers, etc came into NYC with wagons to make money moving people and their things around all day. There’s a few quotes about this on the Wikipedia page. A good one from 1832: “On the 1st of May the city of New York has the appearance of sending off a population flying from the plague, or of a town which had surrendered on condition of carrying away all their goods and chattels. Rich furniture and ragged furniture, carts, wagons, and drays, ropes, canvas, and straw, packers, porters, and draymen, white, yellow, and black, occupy the streets from east to west, from north to south, on this day. Every one I spoke to on the subject complained of this custom as most annoying, but all assured me it was unavoidable, if you inhabit a rented house. More than one of my New York friends have built or bought houses solely to avoid this annual inconvenience” Moving Day finally ended during WW2 because they couldn’t get enough able-bodied men in town to help move people. They were all away at war. These labor shortages + a general housing shortage + rent control finally put an end to NYC’s Moving Day.

@damonhemmerding @BullandBaird Preach

Agreed, @BullandBaird, that the “delete and report spam” is useless - but this beg button is even less effective than that one.

@JoshuaKushner You know what data centers are more beautiful than? A parking garage They can definitely be more beautiful though

make data centers aesthetically beautiful

@bobbyfijan Came out strongly in the Opendoor data as well. Also, few renovations have positive ROI at all

And that, ladies and gentlemen … is why all cabinets are white, all the floors are gray and all the appliances are “stainless”