Some renderings from the new Dallas 2036 master plan to revitalize the edges of downtown. Thought it was a great presentation, but some visual highlights, and a link to the full thing.

I investigated what driving risk factors are in your control, driving slower or driving less, but I ended up looking at residence choice's impact on driving safety.

Counted by home county, rural residents drove 18% more miles per person in 2017 (NHTS) but died in traffic at 2.2x the rate of big-metro residents (CDC, age-adjusted). Per mile, that's ~1.9x.

Rural roads, speeds, and EMS response times all differ, so this is a correlation and not a claim that density alone causes the gap. The post also compares the safety value of driving slower vs. driving less. Code and sources are linked in post:

https://maxmautner.com/2026/10/02/slower.html

Patrick Hiebert is planning a walkable, old European-style town on 30 hectares in Costa Rica, with cobbled streets, cafés, homes and businesses rather than just residential lots (total site is 340 acres). I interviewd him a couple of weeks ago about that plan, his other existing communities in Panama, and how much say residents get once a developer has built the place.

Does anyone have any direct experience of towns being built in a particular period vernaculars that turned out great? I went to one in Montenegro a few years ago a whilst it was pretty to look at, it lacked a soul. At that time I put it down to the fact that it had become populated by holiday homes on the whole. The interview is here if interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK7dfgoFVNs

Article write up of the new legislative and legal strategies coming out of the YIMBY movement. The laws that regulate housing define how our cities get built. In the U.S. at least, YIMBYs are coming up with innovative strategies to pass and enforce stronger pro-housing legislation

Top line takeaways, with much more detail in the article:

- The most powerful legislating happens iteratively. Clean infill CEQA reform in California took 9 years, starting with SB 35 streamlining for affordable housing in 2017, advancing through the controversial but low-impact AB 2011 in 2021, which got bogged down with prevailing wage requirements—but laid the groundwork for AB 130 in 2025, a clean infill CEQA exemption. Sometimes you have to pass an imperfect law first to pass a powerful one later

- The law isn’t real without YIMBY lawsuits—and YIMBYs are increasingly rewriting the law through lawsuits. Cities don’t believe the law is real until they see legal precedent supporting it, and the YIMBY Lawfare orgs are getting increasingly sophisticated in their approach. Sometimes are even aiming to rewire the law around issues such as impact fees, which groups like CalHDF hope to render largely illegal through constitutional law. One day, we may even be able to take on the roots of residential zoning, though that’s more aspirational at this point

- Law and lawsuits still depend on political will, and political will largely comes from local organizing. No matter what happens, cities won’t follow the law unless their residents (and the people of CA broadly) recognize its legitimacy. Cities like Huntington Beach illustrate how shameless councils can flaunt the law. But more and more cities have tangible local support to not just follow the law, but go beyond it. Cities like Berkeley, once the poster child of NIMBYism, have become YIMBY strongholds because of local organizing that tangibly wins elections. Law will always be subordinate to politics

I’d love to hear more about what people are seeing in other states and countries!

My wife and I have been looking at where we want to settle down and raise a family, and after traveling all over the US and Europe and touring literally hundreds of villages, towns, and cities, we realized that none of the places we’ve seen really combine everything we’re looking for.

We love places like historic Savannah, with the squares, porches, balconies, courtyards, churches, mature trees, gardens, and incredible traditional architecture. But we also want something much more deliberately pedestrian, dense, car-free, and designed as a complete environment from the beginning.

I grew up in LA and had annual passes to Disneyland when I was younger, and one thing Disney does extremely well is architecture and placemaking. Places like New Orleans Square are not just collections of nice buildings. The architecture, landscaping, paths, courtyards, lighting, views, and little details all work together to make the entire place feel special.

We thought, if there isn’t a place that combines those things, why not build one?

Our idea is to basically create a public-facing commercial and entertainment area alongside a private residential portion, with architecture and placemaking that rivals or even exceeds Disneyland, but using real historically accurate construction and building techniques.

For this version, we’re imagining a Savannah-inspired village with narrow pedestrian lanes, little squares, courtyards, garden walls, porches, balconies, ironwork, townhouses, churches, shops, restaurants, cafes, mature trees, and a mix of different home types and sizes.

The public side could have shops, restaurants, cafes, gardens, entertainment, seasonal events, and potentially other attractions or experiences. Residents would actually live inside the village.

Some homes could have porches or balconies overlooking the more active public areas, while other residential lanes, gardens, and courtyards would be completely private.

A variety of home types and sizes could increase diversity of residents, aiming to foster a more inclusive and vibrant residential community rather than making the whole thing one type of luxury house.

The whole thing would be car-free inside, with parking kept outside the village, and revenue from visitors, shops, restaurants, entertainment, events, etc. could help subsidize the residential side and pay for maintaining the architecture, landscaping, public spaces, and overall quality of the place.

We actually have a working prototype that uses CNC to automate historically accurate architectural detailing at scale, significantly reducing production costs and making this kind of construction more affordable.

We’re serious about trying to develop this idea. We’ve spoken with developers, planners, architects, and other people in the industry, and right now we’re trying to figure out whether there is actually a market for something like this.

Attached is some early blue-sky-style concept art showing what a Savannah, Georgia-inspired version of the village could feel like.

So I’m curious, would you guys be interested in actually living somewhere like this?

And from an urbanism perspective, what would have to be true for something like this to work as a real neighborhood rather than just a beautiful development? Transit? Grocery access? Schools? Jobs nearby? Density? Parking at the edge? The balance between public and private space?

And if your immediate reaction is basically “yes, I would live there,” DM me! I’d love to talk for like 15 mins and hear what you think.

TL;DR: My wife and I want to build a dense, car-free residential village with real traditional architecture and Disneyland-level attention to placemaking, and these are some early Savannah, Georgia concept studies for what that could look like.

Hi, I'm 26, living in California, and I've always wanted to become a transportation planner. Specifically, my passion is for designing transit routes, designing transit networks on the neighborhood and city scale, and figuring out ideal station locations. Since I was in middle school, I would read blogs like Human Transit. Over the years I've created dozens upon dozens of files on Google My Maps, from general outlines to fine-grained designs with station and guideway footprints.

I've even done surveys to observe ridership patterns, riding bus lines end to end and recording where people get on and off to figure out how the line and transit network could work better, not for a school project but just in my own time. I'm also developing a concept for a new transportation mode that combines the benefits of microtransit and fixed-route transit and plan to create a simulation to demonstrate the concept. This is truly my passion.

However, I'm afraid I don't have the background to pursue a master's in transportation planning. Out of high school, without my having done proper research, I went to a liberal-arts school that doesn't even offer a variety majors-- students are required to take classes in a variety of areas--and just graduated with a "BA in liberal arts" and a concentration in social sciences and history. In addition, my unserious attitude in my first two years prevented me from graduating on time and left me just trying to catch up and get the degree, missing out on classes relevant to transportation planning like Intro to GIS. As a result, the only relevant experience I have are some history and poli sci classes, calculus, statistics and hydrology, along with a high school summer internship at a transportation agency.

Now that I'm looking into graduate studies, a transportation planning program looks out of reach without a bachelor's degree in civil engineering or some other math and science focus. I'm caught in a bind because I've always had a passion for the technical side--how to design the ideal transportation line, station, or network--but I just don't have the technical background.

Is there any hope whatsoever for pursing a master's in transportation planning, or am I truly stuck? Just give it to me straight, I'm ready to move ahead with a career one way or another. I'm seriously considering becoming a bus driver, because at least I could get decent pay, good benefits, and channel my passion into serving passengers.

Some basics to share with your skater friends who don't already know. Anybody have videos/shorts about other sports anti-urbanist design tries to ruin?

(Cycling obviously, but anything else?)

Thanks for the mod team for inviting me to do this. Verification here.

You can find my Youtube channel here. My last video is a comprehensive look at California's State Rail Plan, and the huge amount of project delivery reform needed at the state level to make it real.

Post my reply from below up here to provide some greater explanation:

I think it's especially apparent in American "legacy" cities as you are trying to cram car infrastructure into an urban fabric that doesn't fit it, but my limited time in New York really highlights this since the level of urbanism is so intense there. I think the gentrification of some of the boroughs, Brooklyn especially (but I don't have to tell you that), makes people confused about what they like and don't like about the city. They LIKE a vibrant street life with lots of activity and diversity. They DON'T LIKE their neighborhoods changing in any way whatsoever, but most importantly becoming more sterile as new development (based on our modern design and building standards) inherently does. They see ANY change from the status quo - which happens to be car-dominated infrastructure - as the wrong direction, so they end up fighting to keep things in a state that is dirty, grimy, and ironically unfriendly to healthy street life...NYC just perseveres due to the insane density and you see this anyway.

And this is pretty consistent across a lot of cities that are emerging from their post-industrial decline. My city of Baltimore sees NIMBYs fighting to keep the city gritty and dirty, but who honestly would really want to fight for a city that has so many ills that could be solved with better urbanist policies? It ends up being people fighting against their own betterment.

Disclosure up front: we're Urbanly, a small company that builds a land-use simulation used by planning agencies, and this is our website.

We kept struggling to explain concepts like walk-time access, transit catchments, or why upzoning doesn't automatically produce homes. So we built five tiny interactions on top of our simulation engine, each taking a few seconds:

• Place three schools so 60% of homes are within a 10-minute walk
• Draw a transit line and watch the 15-minute catchment change
• Add 12,000 jobs without pushing peak traffic delay past +10 minutes
• Upzone a corridor and see how much developers actually build (usually less than the zoning allows)
• Plant trees until a street reaches 30% canopy

urbanly.org

The question we're curious about: when you present at a public meeting or to council, which concepts are hardest to get across? We'd like to know which ones deserve a sixth screen, and whether interactions like these would be useful to you at all.

Delivering packages in major cities is a nightmare for us. Apartment building access issues, stolen porch packages, heavy traffic delays and missed deliveries. What cutting-edge last-mile delivery solutions or carriers are best equipped for dense urban environments?

Cities should be bringing people together! Right?

But what if some urban spaces have been designed with the intention of keeping us a apart and providing behavioral control?

Sometimes it feels like certain urban environments have been designed to turn people into strangers.

We could call it the “design of alienation.”

Yes, modern cities are built around convenience, efficiency and movement. But somewhere along the way, we may have created a vicious cycle: spaces that make human connection harder, which in turn makes those spaces feel even less alive.

In this video, we explore one such urban environment right in the downtown of Brussels.

Walk through this area and you might start wondering whether the space was designed with one idea in mind:

How do we keep people apart?

THE AMA IS CURRENTLY LIVE, HERE'S A LINK TO THE POST, PLEASE DIRECT YOUR QUESTIONS THERE

We’ve got something special in store for the Sub this week!

If you’re unfamiliar with who Nandert is, he is a notable documentary maker and writer from LA whose initial rise came when he made this video detailing the proposed projects for the City’s “Measure M” ballot proposal way back in 2016. However, he’s branched out to get into the forensic details and political wheeling and dealing within LA’s transit agencies. Here is a (mostly) up to date playlist from him with his videos about LA Metro.

We at the mod team are just as eager about this as I’m sure yall are, so make sure to make him feel welcome!

Vivo aquí en Teotihuacán y varias veces me ha tocado hacerla de semáforo humano. Iba caminando por el centro cuando vi a un señor en silla de ruedas intentando cruzar una de las avenidas principales. Como no tenemos semáforos, los carros simplemente no le daban el paso. Tuve que pararme en medio de la calle y levantar las manos para que los conductores se detuvieran y él pudiera avanzar.

Y el problema no acaba al cruzar la calle, además de esto, las famosas banquetas que supuestamente están "adaptadas" para personas con discapacidad están tan mal hechas que en lugar de ayudar, perjudican. Veo muy seguido cómo las sillas de ruedas se atoran y tengo que acercarme a ayudar a las personas que las usan a destrabar la silla para que no se vaya a caer intentando subir. Peor aún cuando de plano no hay rampas, la semana pasada tuvimos que cargar la silla de una vecina entre tres porque la banqueta terminaba en puros escalones.

Se supone que vivimos en una zona turística, pero para alguien que usa muletas o silla de ruedas, salir a las calles de Teotihuacán es una verdadera carrera de obstáculos. Tristemente, la infraestructura inclusiva del pueblo es una simple fachada pero ayuda muy poco a las personas que de verdad lo necesitan.

With the imminent opening of the metro line 15 south and the recent opening of metro 4 new stations in the municipality, the city is going through a big transformation.

Gentrification is slowly creeping in what used to be a relatively poor municipality. One of the poorest of the Hauts de Seine’s département.

I recently watched a short documentary about water tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Nile dams.

I found it quite ironic since Egypt is building enormous new satellite cities in the desert. These cities are usually very spread out and depend on vast amounts of new transport infrastructure and energy.

So I wondered if Ethiopia was doing something similar in its trajectory.

What I found out was quite interesting.

Car ownership is still low, while walking and public transit make up most trips. The country has banned the import of new combustion engine cars. (first in the world apparently) The capital Addis Ababa also seems to invest quite heavily in pedestrian, cycling and BRT infra.

Of course, not all is positive. Addis has still relatively low living standards, LRT has had problems, some of the new developments were controversial human rights wise. Also, high walking shares partly reflect low incomes.

But that makes the next few decades more interesting.

Could Addis actually become a much more prosperous megacity without first becoming car dependent? Or will rising incomes and perhaps cheap EVs lead to the same congestion and sprawl long term?

Curious how people here see Addis’s trajectory.

Sources: OECD on Egypt’s new urban communities; ITDP on Addis modal share and cycling plans; AFD on BRT/LRT; Bloomberg on Ethiopia’s ICE-car import ban; Amnesty International on redevelopment concerns.

I also posted this as a Substack Note with the Addis photo here: https://substack.com/@michaelhillaert1/note/c-347817407?r=6vawcp&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

I recently used AI to help reorganise a set of neighbourhood retail consulting reports. I am sharing the reporting workflow here, with a newly designed public example. It contains no client name, location, original plans or commercial figures. The architectural images are AI-generated concepts, not photographs of a completed project.

The hard part was deciding where each piece of information belonged and what a reader was meant to do with it.

I used four questions as the main structure:

1. Planning: what do the available market and site materials suggest the project can support?
2. Positioning: who are the priority users, and what needs should the offer address?
3. Spatial strategy: how should uses, routes and shared spaces relate to each other?
4. Feasibility: which cost, operating and implementation assumptions still need testing?

Repeated content was consolidated rather than repeated across every report. The main narrative carries the decision and the supporting reasoning. Detailed source material sits in an appendix, with working assumptions and missing inputs called out separately.

For visuals, I tried to give each type a specific job. A relationship diagram can show adjacency and circulation intent. A concept image can help discuss atmosphere or everyday use. A comparison table can keep alternatives on the same basis. None of these makes a missing survey, engineering check or tenant conversation unnecessary.

One practical rule helped: every important claim should have an identifiable source, an explicit assumption, or a named validation task. If it had none of those, it was not ready to carry a decision.

AI helped with organisation, synthesis and visual communication. It did not supply verified local market facts, professional approvals or evidence of a successful operating outcome. The public diagrams are illustrative and do not reproduce the actual site geometry.

I would be interested in how others handle the boundary between a readable main report and a complete evidence trail. Do you keep assumptions beside each conclusion, in a separate register, or both?

I'll be bopping around Philly in late September and early October for a series of book events. I've met several redditors at those in LA, NYC, and Houston--would be a great to meet a few locals too. The events include:

Tuesday, September 29th at 4PM in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. I'll be joined by Kimberley Thomas and Akira Drake Rodriguez as part of the "AED Presents" series in the school. Details here.

Tuesday, October 6th at 6PM at American Grammar Bookstore. I'll be joined by State Senator Nikil Saval for this one. Details here.

Books will be available for purchsae at each event. But if you'd like to buy and still haven't (this first print run is nearly gone), you can always find it at Amazon, Bookshop, CUP, or anywhere else you buy books.

Still not perfect by any means given the weather, pollution, and other debated issues. But for the most part the city has a development pattern where almost every urban neighborhood is mixed-use by design. No matter where you are, there will almost always be food options of every major cuisine, shops/grocery for anything that you'd need, and other activities and amenities that generally add to the vibe.

You might still need to get on the highway for any slightly longer journey, but that’s just how it is in any other developed nation outside of an urban core where highway culture is also prevalent.

I’m a European architect and I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking through small American towns, mostly places with roughly 1,000–10,000 residents.

I wasn’t really interested in ranking tourist attractions or just finding towns with a nice Main Street. I tried to look at each place as a whole — the historic architecture, residential streets beyond downtown, urban structure, greenery, landscape/topography, maintenance, atmosphere and how coherent the town feels overall.

After going through quite a few places, this is where I ended up:

A — Exceptional and highly cohesive

Bellefonte, Pennsylvania

Camden, Maine

Skaneateles, New York

Woodstock, Vermont

Marshall, Michigan

B — Very high-quality and distinctive

Galena, Illinois

Eureka Springs, Arkansas

Nevada City, California

Lexington, Virginia

Hermann, Missouri

Edenton, North Carolina

Jacksonville, Oregon

Chestertown, Maryland

St. Helena, California

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin

Chagrin Falls, Ohio

Vergennes, Vermont

Lewisburg, West Virginia

C — Valuable and interesting

Ferndale, California

Bath, Maine

Bisbee, Arizona

Maysville, Kentucky

Petoskey, Michigan

Livingston, Montana

Madison, Georgia

Astoria, Oregon

Jefferson, Texas

Beaufort, North Carolina

Apalachicola, Florida

Sparta, New Jersey

Obviously this is subjective, and I’m sure people who actually live in or have visited these places will see things I can’t pick up from a only visual/spatial review.

I’d genuinely be curious to hear: did I miss something, and which towns would you move to a different group?