@danielfirth
Policy nerd - urban planner - map fan 🏳️🌈. Director of City Climate Action Research at C40 Cities. Ex Transport for London, City of Stockholm and Metro Vancouver TransLink. Opinions are my own or borrowed from someone smarter.
🚨Deadline Extended! You now have until 10 March to submit your #I4C26 Session Proposal.
Co-hosted by GCoM & UN-Habitat, I4C26 will drive momentum for innovators, practitioners & researchers ready to shape city-led climate solutions.
Discover our step-by-step guide:
https://tinyurl.com/7hw8em93
It's just an endless loop of "drivers are struggling with the number of drivers, we just need to make it easier to drive" forever and ever.
The province's own commissioned report was like "you're gonna spend a lot of money on this and traffic will get worse."
A view of a string of gondoal cabins
A view of the neighbourhood
Vents through the windows of the gondola
We go over a freeway with billboards and houses in the backgroud
This is my first time on a modern urban gondola. It affected me far more than I expected. All you hear are children laughing, roosters, dogs, and the rush of wind. It is so peaceful, and overwhelming. The vents give you a great breeze. The highway reminds you how loud cars are.
Great quote by @norton.bsky.social at the (anti) motonormativity days in Lausanne
This cartoon of his lives rent free in my brain.
Abstract for Transportation for the Abundant Society: A growing chorus known as the abundance movement seeks to overcome artificial scarcity in the built environment—especially housing. Yet this movement’s signature goal of increasing housing production collides with a central driver of scarcity: development restrictions rooted in traffic concerns. Advocates often assume that building more housing will generate support for needed transportation reform. Experience suggests otherwise. In auto-dependent regions, adding housing without reconfiguring transportation tends to reinforce the logic of restriction. Unlocking abundance’s promised feedback loops requires re-grounding transportation policy in its relationship to land use. This Article makes two contributions. First, it introduces into legal analysis a core urban-planning framework: transportation accessibility, which evaluates system performance by users’ ability to reach destinations. Though facially modest, anchoring policy in accessibility would depart sharply from a century of practice, with significant implications across state and local government law. Second, drawing on 13 original interviews with current and former transportation officials, the Article develops a novel account of institutional barriers to reform. Far from the marble corridors and mahogany courtrooms where law is articulated, transportation policy is functionally made in the unglamorous offices of state and local government. We call this institutional crucible—shaped by agency culture and industry convention as well as hard law—“transportation policy linoleum.” It helps explain why proven, seemingly unobjectionable reforms routinely wither. The Article closes with a policy playbook designed to help accessibility break through the linoleum and deliver abundance.
Table of Contents CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 3 I. ABUNDANCE AND TRANSPORTATION POLICY 6 A. The Rise of Abundance 7 B. Transportation as a Binding Constraint 10 II. THE PURPOSE OF TRANSPORTATION POLICY 17 A. What Counts as Success? 18 B. From Mobility to Access 20 C. Transportation Policy Spillovers 24 1. Housing affordability 24 2. Climate mitigation 28 3. Roadway safety 29 III. OPERATIONAL BARRIERS TO REFORM 32 A. Network Effects and System Interdependence 33 B. Operational Complexity and Risk 34 IV. LEGAL BARRIERS TO REFORM 36 A. NEPA and the Dawn of Conservation Primacy 36 B. Judges as Planners: California’s CEQA Regime 40 C. Judges as Planners Around the Country 44 1. Minnesota and comprehensive planning 44 2. Washington, D.C. and density review 46 3. Montana and constitutional penumbra 46 V. TRANSPORTATION POLICY LINOLEUM 48 A. Policy “In Books” and “In Action”: 13 Interviews 48 B. Fragmentation and Coordination Failures 49 C. Path Dependence and Institutional Lock-In 53 D. Legal Risk and Defensive Administration 55 VI. A POLICY PLAYBOOK FOR ACCESS 57 A. Behavioral Data as Participation 57 1. Ex ante participation 58 2. Ex post participation 59 B. Realistic Alternatives Modeling 59 C. A More Honest Cost-Benefit Analysis 60 1. Requiring cost-benefit discipline 61 2. Accounting for opportunity costs and externalities 63 CONCLUSION 64
ToC continued, plus first bit of text from article: A central claim of the emerging “abundance agenda” is that in the physical world, more is more: more housing, more clean energy, and more infrastructure to support both. Abundance brings the American promise of plenty into policy, arguing that government should expand capacity—so that individuals can access the good life and society can advance climate goals, scientific discovery, and prosperity. In both its academic and popular expressions, the ideologically diverse movement contends that law has created artificial scarcity and that the remedy is to loosen outdated constraints and rebuild state capacity so government can build and approve major projects—housing, transportation, energy, health—more quickly and reliably. Abundance draws on a substantial literature diagnosing law-made supply constraints in American public policy. Its core question is pragmatic: how to clear regulatory blockages to enable more building. Scholars have long identified such blockages at the intersection of land use and transportation, from highways to high-speed rail. Yet even improved megaprojects would not meet most Americans’ daily transportation needs. And the connection between transportation policy and abundance remains underdeveloped, even as political interest grows.
✨ introducing… ✨
🌇 Transportation for the Abundant Society 🚅
"Abundance" says our problem is artificial scarcity—especially housing. But you can’t build your way out if transportation policy still treats traffic flow as sacred.
Transportation is the binding constraint. ssrn.com/abstract=538...
A green upgrade for markets in Lagos 🇳🇬
The Ikosi Market Anaerobic Digester has launched. The goals? Simple.
1. Collect market waste
2. Turn it into clean energy
3. Power the community
Thank you to the UK and Nigeria for making this pilot possible: c40.me/lagos-c40-handover
Nick Suzuki and Team Canada 🇨🇦 on the metro in Milan, Italy 🇮🇹
The Sermon on the Mount, by Beryl Lewis, before 1965, 📸 by @ScottStrazzante
Although looking at the logo now, it almost looks like we were bidding for the 2206 games - unlikely there will be much snow left by then, but on the plus side, Slussen might be finished!
Logo of the Stockholm Åre 2026 Candidate City Olympic Winter Games, in traditional, colourful kurbits or rose-painting style
A map showing some of the infrastructure planned in Stockholm for the 2026 games. Several projects still under construction would likely have been accelerated including the metro lines to Barkaby and Arenastaden, and perhaps the major project at Slussen
With the Winter Olympics opening in Milan I am reminded that one of the last things I worked on before leaving the City of Stockholm was our unsuccessful 2026 bid.
I wonder how many ongoing infrastructure projects would have been accelerated if we’d won?
(Also, our logo was clearly superior!)
🚨🚨" Some leaders have chosen to hunt them down and deport them through operations that are both unlawful and cruel. My government has chosen a different way: a fast and simple path to regularize their immigration status." Spanish PM Pedro #Sanchez on why #migrants are essential for Western society:
“Jaywalking is permitted in London. In 1966, the police tried to crack down on it, but gave up after three months.”
People walk and cycle on roads by right, people drive under licence.
Jaywalking is not a thing in English law and Waymo must not change that.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Interesting contrast in coverage: a misleading, vested-interest report suggesting heat pumps raise UK bills made headlines.
Our peer-reviewed UK research showing high real-world efficiency across hundreds of homes was largely ignored by the media.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Big moment for Europe: in December, fully electric cars outsold petrol-only cars in the EU for the first time.
This shows that clear, consistent policy works. Which is exactly why backtracking now would be a mistake. Rolling back targets or creating uncertainty would slow investment and innovation.
It’s entirely on-topic; it’s a bostadsrätt, which just further demonstrates the dysfunction in both London and Stockholm housing markets :(
*cheques were what we used to pay large sums of money in the ancient, pre on-line banking times - which in the UK meant until quite recently
A cheque book stub for 900 pounds payed to ”Rent”, dated 2 November 2005
Having a clearout and found my old chequebook*
GBP900 was my monthly rent in 2005 for a one room flat in South Ealing, a 45 minute tube ride from work
It’s more than I now pay for a three room apartment a ten minute metro ride from central Stockholm 🤯
I just installed a new home printer and had it work first time.
(Yes I am aware that having printer and Goldeneye references expose me as a total GenX-er)
“We’ve invented a magic computer. It uses all of the earth’s resources, we’ve spent trillions on it and it’s the sole growth area of the US economy.”
“What does it do?”
“We were hoping you could tell us.”
Jag har velat åka till Brasília sen jag var typ 12 år. Var inte besviken.
Nästa Chandigarh eller Canberra.
a medieval fresco of a rabbit vomiting milk into a bucket
Rabbit, Sweden, 15th century
Jag har inte heller fått fredspriset så som min kompis sa på nyår:
Det här är året som jag börjar gaffla i kommentarsfält
...engineers are problem solvers - you just need to give them the right problem to solve. That meant working with them to define the right essay question based on political direction. (That and that fewer cars means more work for signal engineers, not less -> they were worried about their jobs)
Thanks so much for this, I really enjoyed it and hope there'll be more!
Lots of recognition for me in your discussion upfront about the importance of getting traffic signal engineers on board - I spent a lot of time on this in my work in Stockholm and London. The short version:...
It’s been a grey miserable weekend in Stockholm, matching the dire situation in the world beyond.
But right now, the park outside my living room window is filled with young furries in colourful fur suits, and it is bringing me some unexpected joy and hope ❤️🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
Read more about how in our report Past the peak: www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/Pa...
Congratulations Salvador - not just one of the sixty C40 cities that have passed their peak emissions, but one of the eleven that have reduced their post-peak emissions by more than 30%
🚨 Snow plow tram klaxon 🚨
In any sane world we would call this a Tramboni. (It's possible this joke only works in hockey-playing countries en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_res...)
![David Bowie - I'm Afraid of Americans (Official Video) [4K]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:dixjws76szwus65ut6pwvqeu/bafkreifkz4rf4rmwvz2lwp4f3zzwb3mxjml7nb4prxmfcte6ceuvtuqqz4@jpeg)